Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We live for books.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Culture Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

2. “To survive, you must tell stories.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “Translation is the art of failure.”

— Umberto Eco

4. “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”

— Umberto Eco

5. “A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.”

— Umberto Eco

6. “Love is wiser than wisdom.”

— Umberto Eco

7. “As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”

— Umberto Eco

8. “What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?”

— Umberto Eco

9. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

10. “Beauty is boring because it is predictable.”

— Umberto Eco

11. “I write what I write.”

— Umberto Eco

12. “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

13. “The good of a book lies in its being read.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Book Quotes

14. “All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.”

— Umberto Eco

15. “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

16. “When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Strong Quotes

17. “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.”

— Umberto Eco

18. “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

19. “I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.”

— Umberto Eco

20. “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Book Quotes

21. “There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”

— Umberto Eco

22. “There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.”

— Umberto Eco

23. “The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.”

— Umberto Eco

24. “If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.”

— Umberto Eco

25. “Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.”

— Umberto Eco

26. “You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Book Quotes

27. “Listening doesn’t mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don’t know you know.”

— Umberto Eco

28. “Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other. They touch each other sensually, they kiss each other’s breasts lightly, with the tip of the tongue.”

— Umberto Eco

29. “Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”

— Umberto Eco

30. “National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.”

— Umberto Eco

31. “The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything – reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?”

— Umberto Eco

32. “Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.”

— Umberto Eco

33. “The truth is an anagram of an anagram.”

— Umberto Eco

34. “But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.”

— Umberto Eco

35. “The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.”

— Umberto Eco

36. “Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.”

— Umberto Eco

37. “I don’t know, maybe we’re always looking for the right place, maybe it’s within reach, but we don’t recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.”

— Umberto Eco

38. “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

39. “Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it’s more amusing – ugliness – than beauty.”

— Umberto Eco

40. “A library’s ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste’s stall, a place for trouvailles.”

— Umberto Eco

41. “When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

— Umberto Eco

42. “We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.”

— Umberto Eco

43. “Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything.”

— Umberto Eco

44. “The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come...”

— Umberto Eco

45. “Books always speak of other books.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Book Quotes

46. “Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.”

— Umberto Eco

47. “A secret is powerful when it is empty.”

— Umberto Eco

48. “I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.”

— Umberto Eco

50. “I felt like poisoning a monk.”

— Umberto Eco