Umberto Eco Quotes

276 quotes in 3431 categories

• Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
• The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have…
• In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
• If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's…
• The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell…
• The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by…
• The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must…
• Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
• When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us…
• There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
• American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC
• There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a…
• He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
• The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch…
• A secret is powerful when it is empty.
• Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
• That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a…
• Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
• Jacopo Belbo didnt understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not…
• The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors.…

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