Umberto Eco Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Umberto Eco quote about:
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“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“Then why do you want to know?" "Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“We like lists because we don't want to die.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“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.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“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.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).”
-- Umberto Eco -
“In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian, because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation. A person who asks for help makes the librarian happy.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes, served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup contains more caffeine than four espressos.”
-- Umberto Eco -
“Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?”
-- Umberto Eco
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More Umberto Eco quote about:
- Hatred,
- Heart,
- Home,
- Imagination,
- Inspirational,
- Internet,
- Joy,
- Language,
- Laughter,
- Libraries,
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