Umberto Eco quotes

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. (Umberto Eco)
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Umberto Eco
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
Umberto Eco
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Umberto Eco
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
Umberto Eco
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
Umberto Eco
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Umberto Eco
Translation is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
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 toward 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.
Umberto Eco
I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over. (Umberto Eco)
I felt like poisoning a monk.
Umberto Eco
We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.
Umberto Eco
We live for books.
Umberto Eco
All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Umberto Eco
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong.
Umberto Eco
Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth. (Umberto Eco)
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.
Umberto Eco
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
Umberto Eco