“Success is like a ladder and no one has ever climbed a ladder with their hands in their pockets.”
“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”
Source: The Name of the Rose
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Umberto Eco 120
Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic… 1932–2016Related quotes

“But science is permitted because this wisdom is like a ladder to climb to the Torah wisdom.”
Netiv Hatorah 14

Source: Video game commentary, PowerWash Simulator (2021)

"No Religion is an Island", p. 266
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

“Your son’s heroes didn’t climb traditional ladders—they built their own.”
Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 53
“Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.”
"Poetry For Supper"
Poetry For Supper (1958)
Context: Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.

The Circus Animals' Desertion, III
Last Poems (1936-1939)