Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”

— Umberto Eco

52. “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

53. “Ma gavte la nata.”

— Umberto Eco

54. “A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection – not an invitation for hypnosis.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

63. “People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”

— Umberto Eco

64. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

67. “By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.”

— Umberto Eco

68. “They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.”

— Umberto Eco

69. “When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

72. “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

73. “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

74. “He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.”

— Umberto Eco

75. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

77. “Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.”

— Umberto Eco

78. “What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

81. “The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.”

— Umberto Eco

82. “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

83. “All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.”

— Umberto Eco

84. “We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don’t know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us – but is living close to us.”

— Umberto Eco

85. “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

86. “The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”

— Umberto Eco

87. “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

88. “Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

90. “Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

92. “It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

94. “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

95. “It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.”

— Umberto Eco

96. “Bauman notes that a typical feature of the interregnum, once the faith in salvation from above, from the state, or from revolution is gone, is indignation. Such indignation knows what it doesn’t want, but not what it does.”

— Umberto Eco

97. “To each memorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a piece of the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains of apothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances of hysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea, processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies of gymnosophists – and so on, to infinity.”

— Umberto Eco

98. “Man’s principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?”

— Umberto Eco

99. “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

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

— Umberto Eco