Umberto Eco quotes

Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, philosopher, and semiotician, renowned for his intellectually rich novels such as "The Name of the Rose." His works explore themes of history, language, and the nature of interpretation. He made significant contributions to literary theory and remains an influential figure in both literature and semiotics. Here are 256 of his quotes:

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 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

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