Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.”

— Umberto Eco

102. “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

103. “We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

105. “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

106. “Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.”

— Umberto Eco

107. “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

108. “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

109. “The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, 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

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

— Umberto Eco

111. “Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.”

— Umberto Eco

112. “An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d’Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it’s an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege.”

— Umberto Eco

113. “Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

— Umberto Eco

114. “Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.”

— Umberto Eco

115. “Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I’m involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.”

— Umberto Eco

116. “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

117. “Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?” “Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.” “In Paris do they always have the true answer?” “Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.”

— Umberto Eco

118. “As Clark Kent I take care of misunderstood young geniuses; as Superman I punish justly misunderstood old geniuses. I.”

— Umberto Eco

119. “I know nothing. There is nothing that I know. But the heart senses certain things. Let your heart speak, question faces, do not listen to tongues.”

— Umberto Eco

120. “Libraries can take the place of God.”

— Umberto Eco

121. “I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”

— Umberto Eco

122. “At a certain historical moment, some people found the suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians. After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.”

— Umberto Eco

123. “American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC.”

— Umberto Eco

124. “Yes, I know, it’s not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.”

— Umberto Eco

125. “Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.”

— Umberto Eco

126. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

128. “Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”

— Umberto Eco

129. “One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.”

— Umberto Eco

130. “Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.”

— Umberto Eco

131. “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

132. “The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

134. “That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.”

— Umberto Eco

135. “But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.”

— Umberto Eco

136. “My collection of rare books concerns only books that don’t tell the truth.”

— Umberto Eco

137. “The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.”

— Umberto Eco

138. “Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.”

— Umberto Eco

139. “I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

143. “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

144. “I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare’s tragedies.”

— Umberto Eco

145. “Simple mechanisms do not love.”

— Umberto Eco

146. “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

147. “The followers must feel besieged.”

— Umberto Eco

148. “In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.”

— Umberto Eco

149. “The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.”

— Umberto Eco

150. “My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.”

— Umberto Eco