He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
UMBERTO ECO, "Why Are They Laughing in Those Cages?", Travels in Hyperreality
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, The Name of the Rose
Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.
UMBERTO ECO, The Paris Review, summer 2008
My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.
UMBERTO ECO, On Literature
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.
UMBERTO ECO, The Island of the Day Before
The moment a secret is revealed, it seems little.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
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, The Paris Review, summer 2008
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
UMBERTO ECO, The Island of the Day Before
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
UMBERTO ECO, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
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, Foucault's Pendulum
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
UMBERTO ECO, The Island of the Day Before
Listen, writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
UMBERTO ECO, The Paris Review, summer 2008
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
UMBERTO ECO, The Name of the Rose
The jealous man is not able, nor does he have the will, to imagine the opposite of what he fears, indeed he cannot feel joy except in the magnification of his own sorrow, and by suffering through the magnified enjoyment from which he knows he is banned. 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 -- in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
UMBERTO ECO, The Island of the Day Before
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
UMBERTO ECO, The Name of the Rose
There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the “Masonic secret.” What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
UMBERTO ECO, The Paris Review, summer 2008
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
UMBERTO ECO, postscript, The Name of the Rose
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, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
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, The Name of the Rose
Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.
UMBERTO ECO, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
UMBERTO ECO, The Name of the Rose
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, Foucault's Pendulum
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
UMBERTO ECO, Travels in Hyperreality
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO, The Paris Review, summer 2008
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, Foucault's Pendulum
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
UMBERTO ECO, postscript, The Name of the Rose
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, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
UMBERTO ECO, The Prague Cemetery
When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.
UMBERTO ECO, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
