Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

104. “The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

106. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

109. “How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

111. “If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible. – Talmud, Berakhot, 6.”

— Umberto Eco

112. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

114. “I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

120. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

122. “A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.”

— Umberto Eco

123. “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

124. “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

125. “If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.”

— Umberto Eco

126. “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

127. “When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.”

— Umberto Eco

128. “I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.”

— Umberto Eco

129. “There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read.”

— Umberto Eco

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

134. “The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.”

— Umberto Eco

135. “We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

— Umberto Eco

136. “As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.”

— Umberto Eco

137. “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

138. “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

139. “If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.”

— Umberto Eco

140. “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

141. “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

142. “I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.”

— Umberto Eco

143. “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

144. “There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.”

— Umberto Eco

145. “For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep. Hence the Jews. Divine providence has given them to us, and so, by God, let us use them, and pray there’s always some Jew to fear and to hate. We need an enemy to give people hope.”

— Umberto Eco

146. “To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, “We don’t know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning.” So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.”

— Umberto Eco

147. “We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”

— Umberto Eco

148. “Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.”

— Umberto Eco

149. “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

150. “I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.”

— Umberto Eco