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Umberto Eco Quotes (displaying: 1 - 30 of 226 quotes)

Umberto Eco Quotes
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Theme:
The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
Umberto Eco
We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
Umberto Eco
Characters migrate
Umberto Eco
Theme:
Here he was holding the clear proof of the existence of other skies, but at the same time without having to ascend beyond the celestial spheres, for he intuited many worlds in a piece of coral. Was there any need to calculate the number of forms which the atoms of the Universe could create--burning at the stake all those who said their number was not finite--when it sufficed to meditate for years on one of these marine objects to realize how the deviation of a single atom, whether willed by God or prompted by Chance, could generate inconceivable Milky Ways?
Umberto Eco
The flame consists of a splendid clarity, of an unusual vigor, and od an ingenious ardor, but possesses the splendid clarity that it may illuminate and the ingenious ardor that it may burn.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.
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
Theme:
We'll have to consult Aglie. I doubt that even he knows all these organizations."Want to bet? They're his daily bread. But we can put him to the test. Let's add a sect that doesn't exist. Founded recently."I recalled the curious question of De Angelis, whether I had ever heard of the Tres. And I said: "Tres."What's that?" Belbo asked."If it's an acrostic, there has to be a subtext," Diotallevi said. "Otherwise my rabbis would not have been able to use the notarikon. Lets see... Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. That suit you?"We liked the name, and put it at the bottom of the list."With all these conventicles, inventing one more was no mean trick," Diotallevi said in a sudden fit of vanity.
Umberto Eco
Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
Sometimes I look a the Moon, and I imagine that those darker spots are caverns, cities, islands, and the places that shine are those where the sea catches the light of the sun like the glass of a mirror...I would like to tell of war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries or the bones with the marrow. 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, the little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful'.
Umberto Eco
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
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
Theme:
People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
Umberto Eco
To survive, you must tell stories.
Umberto Eco
but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
In the years when I discoverd the Abb Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing.
Umberto Eco
Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
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 passion of the mind. Such is credulity.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
Umberto Eco
Theme:
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