Umberto Eco idézet

oldal 3

„A túléléshez történeteket kell mesélni.”

„A filozófiának van gyakorlati ereje: hozzájárul a világ megváltoztatásához.”

“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”

“When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.”

“Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.”

“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

“Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.”

“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

“It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.”

“Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

“All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”

“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”

“Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”

“Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”

“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.”

“When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.”

“How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.”

“Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”

“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”

“How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!”

“Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.”

“the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.”

“I felt like poisoning a monk.”

“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”

“The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

“But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”

“I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”

“A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”

“Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.”

“National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.”