Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.”

— Umberto Eco

52. “A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

— Umberto Eco

53. “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

54. “To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.”

— Umberto Eco

55. “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

56. “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

— Umberto Eco

57. “You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.”

— Umberto Eco

58. “The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

— Umberto Eco

59. “I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.”

— Umberto Eco

60. “A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.”

— Umberto Eco

61. “In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.”

— Umberto Eco

62. “How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!”

— Umberto Eco

63. “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

64. “Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”

— Umberto Eco

65. “For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.”

— Umberto Eco

66. “The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.”

— Umberto Eco

67. “Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.”

— Umberto Eco

68. “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

69. “It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one’s own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.”

— Umberto Eco

70. “It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.”

— Umberto Eco

71. “It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.”

— Umberto Eco

72. “A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”

— Umberto Eco

73. “When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.”

— Umberto Eco

74. “I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.”

— Umberto Eco

75. “Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.”

— Umberto Eco

76. “All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

78. “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

79. “Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.”

— Umberto Eco

80. “The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.”

— Umberto Eco

81. “Yesterday’s rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”

— Umberto Eco

82. “You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.”

— Umberto Eco

83. “Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.”

— Umberto Eco

84. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”

— Umberto Eco

85. “The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.”

— Umberto Eco

86. “Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter.”

— Umberto Eco

87. “Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.”

— Umberto Eco

88. “Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.”

— Umberto Eco

89. “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

90. “There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.”

— Umberto Eco

91. “Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.”

— Umberto Eco

92. “All the theories of conspiracy were always a way to escape our responsibilities. It is a very important kind of social sickness by which we avoid recognizing reality such as it is and avoid our responsibilities.”

— Umberto Eco

93. “How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.”

— Umberto Eco

94. “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

95. “Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.”

— Umberto Eco

96. “If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.”

— Umberto Eco

97. “Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.”

— Umberto Eco

98. “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

99. “Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.”

— Umberto Eco

100. “The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.”

— Umberto Eco