Umberto Eco citations
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Umberto Eco, né le 5 janvier 1932 à Alexandrie dans le Piémont et mort le 19 février 2016 à Milan, est un universitaire, érudit et écrivain italien. Reconnu pour ses nombreux essais universitaires sur la sémiotique, l’esthétique médiévale, la communication de masse, la linguistique et la philosophie, il est surtout connu du grand public pour ses œuvres romanesques.

Titulaire de la chaire de sémiotique et directeur de l’École supérieure des sciences humaines à l’université de Bologne, il en était professeur émérite depuis 2008. Wikipedia

✵ 5. janvier 1932 – 19. février 2016

Umberto Eco photo

Università Reggio Calabria, Ufficio Stampa Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria / CC-BY-SA-3.0

Umberto Eco: 134 citations0 J'aime

Umberto Eco citations célèbres

“Moi, je dis qu’il existe une société secrète avec des ramifications dans le monde entier, qui complote pour répandre la rumeur qu’il existe un complot universel.”

Casaubon au commissaire De Angelis, à propos de la synarchie.
Romans, Le Pendule de Foucault (Il pendolo di Foucault), 1988

“Les personnes de peu d'idées sont moins sujettes à l'erreur, elles suivent ce que tout le monde fait et ne dérangent personne, et elles réussissent, s'enrichissent, arrivent à de bonnes positions…”

“« Les hommes ne font jamais le mal aussi complètement et ardemment que lorsqu'ils le font par conviction religieuse. » (p. 26)”

Umberto Eco livre Le Cimetière de Prague

The Prague Cemetery

“L'Ur-fascisme croît et cherche le consensus en exploitant et exacerbant la naturelle peur de la différence. Le premier appel d'un mouvement fasciste ou prématurément fasciste est lancé contre les intrus. L'Ur-fascite est donc raciste par définition.”

Five Moral Pieces

“(…) on considère l’allongement de la durée de vie comme un bien et la pollution atmosphérique comme un mal, mais nous savons que, pour avoir les grands laboratoires où l’on étudie la durée de vie, il est nécessaire de disposer d’un système de communications et de consommer une énergie qui ensuite, de son côté, produit la pollution.”

Essais, À reculons, comme une écrevisse ('), 2006

“99 % du temps passé par ceux que nous voyons serrer cet « objet transitionnel » contre leur oreille est du temps de jeu. L’imbécile qui, à côté de nous dans le train, règle ses transactions financières à haute voix, en fait se pavane avec une couronne de plumes et un anneau multicolore au pénis.”

Sur l’usage du téléphone portable.
Essais, À reculons, comme une écrevisse ('), 2006

Umberto Eco Citations

“La seule chose qu'on écrit pour soi, c'est la liste des courses. Elle sert à vous rappeler ce que vous devez acheter, et une fois vos achats accomplis, vous pouvez la jeter car elle ne sert plus à personne. Tout ce que vous écrivez d'autre, vous l'écrivez pour dire quelque chose à quelqu'un.”

On Literature

“Mais l idéologie proclamée de Forest Lawn est la même que celle du musée Getty qui est gratuitement ouvert au public. C est l idéologie de la conservation, au Nouveau Monde, des trésors que l imprévoyance et le désintérêt du Vieux Monde sont en train de réduire a néant.
Naturellement cette ideologie occulte quelque chose: le desir du profit, dans le cas du cimetiere, et, dans le cas de Getty, le fait que la colonisation affairiste du Nouveau Monde (dont fait partie aussi l empire petrolier de Paul Getty) a affaibli le le Vieux.
Cest exactement les larmes de crocodile du patricien romain qui reproduisait les grandeurs de cette Grece que son pays avait rabaissee au rang de colonie.”

La Guerre du faux

“Il n’existe pas de technique de l’oubli, nous en sommes encore aux processus naturels de hasard – lésions cérébrales, amnésie ou l’improvisation manuelle, que sais-je, un voyage, l’alcool, la cure de sommeil, le suicide.”

“Qu'est-ce qui vous effraie le plus dans la pureté?
— La hâte.”

“(…) les mass media, tandis qu’ils le réprouvaient, ont été les meilleurs alliés de Ben Laden qui, de cette façon, a gagné la première manche.”

Essais, À reculons, comme une écrevisse ('), 2006

“Jusqu'alors j'avais pensé que chaque livre parlait des choses, humaines ou divines, qui se trouvent hors des livres. Or je m'apercevais que qu'il n'est pas rare que les livres parlent de livres, autrement dit, qu'ils parlent entre eux. À la lumière de cette réflexion, la bibliothèque m'apparut encore plus inquiétante. Elle était donc le lieu d'un long et séculaire murmure, d'un dialogue imperceptible entre parchemin et parchemin, une chose vivante, un réceptacle de puissances qu'un esprit humain ne pouvait dominer, trésor de secrets émanés de tant d'esprits, et survivant après la mort de ceux qui les avaient produits, ou s'en étaient faits les messagers.
Le Nom de la rose de Umberto Eco.”

Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

The Name of the Rose

“Le nouveau royaume de Jérusalem est un peu la Californie de l'époque, on peut y faire fortune.”

Umberto Eco livre Le Pendule de Foucault

Le pendule de Foucault

“Je récapitule. Entrez dans une salle de ciné : si pour aller de A à B, les protagonistes mettent plus de temps que vous ne le souhaiteriez, alors c'est un film porno.”

Umberto Eco livre Pastiches et Postiches

Pastiches et Postiches

Umberto Eco: Citations en anglais

“You’ll come back
To me…
It’s written in the stars, you see,
you’ll come back.
You’ll come back,
it’s a fact
that I am strong because I do
believe in you.”

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Umberto Eco livre The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Source: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

“This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.”

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Source: The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library

“Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Cimetière de Prague

Source: The Prague Cemetery

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

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“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.”

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Variante: A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie.
Source: Trattato di semiotica generale (1975); [A Theory of Semiotics] (1976)

“Translation is the art of failure.”

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“I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but
we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Pendule de Foucault

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

“A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

The Name of the Rose (1980)

“We've got to help each other, seeing as God doesn't help us. Do you see how great Jesus' idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he's the only friend us poor wretches have.”

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Umberto Eco livre The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

“The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

William of Baskerville
The Name of the Rose (1980)

“There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

The Name of the Rose (1980)

“How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have? … Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.”

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Umberto Eco livre Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994) Chapter Six: "Fictional Protocols"

“I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.”

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Quoted in Myriem Bouzaher's introduction to the French version of The Name of the Rose, Postille al Nome della Rosa, Page 18 (1985)

“In short, to remember is to reconstruct in part on the basis of what we have learned or said since. That's normal, that's how we remember. I tell you this to encourage you to reactivate some of these profiles of excitation, instead of simply digging obsessively in an effort to find something that's already there, as shiny and new as you imagine it was when you first set it aside … Remembering is a labor, not a luxury.”

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Umberto Eco livre The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

“A sack," Baudolino explained, like a man who knows a trade well, "is like a grape harvest: you have to divide the tasks. There are those who press the grapes, those who carry off the must in the tuns, those who cook for others, others who go to fetch the good wine from last year…. a sack is a serious job,”

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Umberto Eco livre Baudolino

Source: Baudolino (2000), Chapter 2, "Baudolino meets Niketas Choniates"

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.”

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Umberto Eco livre Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994) Chapter Four: "Possible Woods"

“There, Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. … There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.”

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Umberto Eco livre Baudolino

Baudolino (2000)

“In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.”

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Preface to the American edition of Travels in Hyperreality (1986)

“I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.”

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"On the Disadvantages and Advantages of Death" in La mort et l'immortalié, edited by Frédéric Lenoir (2004)

“The language of Europe is translation.”

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Statement in a lecture at the Assises de la Traduction littéraire in Arles (14 November 1993) http://www.eutrio.be/language-europe-translation

“The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

William of Baskerville
The Name of the Rose (1980)

“That man is … odd," I dared say to William.
"He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

The Name of the Rose (1980)

“The Poet had, who had made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves — which, as Niketas remarked with a smile — was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.”

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Umberto Eco livre Baudolino

Source: Baudolino (2000), Chapter 7, "Baudolino makes the Poet write love letters and poems to Beatrice"

“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.”

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"Can Television Teach?" in Screen Education 31 (1979), p. 12

“The emperor of the Latins — who hasn't been a Latin himself since the days of Charlemagne — is the successor of the Roman emperors — the ones of Rome, I mean, not those of Constantinople. But to make sure he's emperor, he has to be crowned by the pope, because the law of Christ has swept away the false law, the law of liars. To be crowned by the pope, the emperor also has to be recognized by the cities of Italy, and each of them kind of goes his own way, so he has to be crowned king of Italy — provided, naturally, that the Teutonic princes have elected him. Is that clear?”

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Umberto Eco livre Baudolino

Source: Baudolino (2000), Chapter 3, "Baudolino explains to Niketas what he wrote as a boy"

“There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but towards hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.”

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Umberto Eco livre Le Nom de la rose

William of Baskerville http://books.google.com/books?id=XY2vXKsHbzIC&q=&quot;There+is+only+one+thing+that+arouses+animals+more+than+pleasure+and+that+is+pain+Under+torture+you+are+as+if+under+the+dominion+of+those+grasses+that+produce+visions+Everything+you+have+heard+told+everything+you+have+read+returns+to+your+mind+as+if+you+were+being+transported+not+toward+heaven+but+towards+helll+Under+torture+you+say+not+only+what+the+inquisitor+wants+but+also+what+you+imagine+might+please+him+because+a+bond+this+truly+diabolical+is+established+between+you+and+him&quot;&pg=PA73#v=onepage <br class="br">The Name of the Rose (1980)

“In this world you either read or write, and writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.”

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Umberto Eco livre The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

“After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.”

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Umberto Eco livre Serendipities

Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (1998)

“I am mimetic. If I write a book set in the seventeenth century, I write in a Baroque style. If I’m writing a book set in a newspaper office, I write in Journalese.”

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quoted in Marco Belpoliti, " Umberto Eco: How I Wrote my Books http://en.doppiozero.com/materiali/interviste/umberto-eco-how-I-wrote-my-books" (2015)

“The basic principle [of hermetic drift semiotics] is not only that the similar can be known through the similar but also that from similarity to similarity everything can be connected with everything else, so that everything can be in turn either the expression or the content of any other thing.”

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U. Eco (1990), The limits of Intepretation, as quoted in Thomas A. Sebeok, Jean Umiker-Sebeok (2020), The Semiotic Web 1991: Biosemiotics https://books.google.it/books?id=NUK0DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA53.

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