Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 9

151. “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

152. “He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.”

— Umberto Eco

153. “Writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.”

— Umberto Eco

154. “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

155. “The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.”

— Umberto Eco

156. “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

157. “Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.”

— Umberto Eco

158. “What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can’t hurt and you might get better.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

160. “Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

162. “Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.”

— Umberto Eco

163. “There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.”

— Umberto Eco

164. “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

165. “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

166. “Naturally, everything depends on one’s background books and on what one is looking for.”

— Umberto Eco

167. “There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ’to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.”

— Umberto Eco

168. “In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

170. “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”

— Umberto Eco

171. “But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn’t believe in it?”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

173. “There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.”

— Umberto Eco

174. “I don’t believe one writes for oneself. I think that writing is an act of love- you write in order to give something to someone else. To communicate something. to have other people share your feelings. This problem of how long your work survives is fundamental for a novelist or a poet. One hopes for a sense of continuity.”

— Umberto Eco

175. “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

176. “The real hero is always a hero by mistake.”

— Umberto Eco

177. “I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”

— Umberto Eco

178. “The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance.”

— Umberto Eco

179. “He fell in love with his golem, found it a source of consolation. Life.”

— Umberto Eco

180. “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

181. “Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky.”

— Umberto Eco

182. “From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.”

— Umberto Eco

183. “Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.”

— Umberto Eco

184. “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.”

— Umberto Eco

185. “Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!”

— Umberto Eco

186. “The prince of darkness is a gentleman. – Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv.”

— Umberto Eco

187. “A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.”

— Umberto Eco

188. “I have to admit that I only read ‘War and Peace’ when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

190. “Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration – acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.”

— Umberto Eco

191. “I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing.”

— Umberto Eco

192. “Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”

— Umberto Eco

193. “In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.”

— Umberto Eco

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

198. “I don’t see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.”

— Umberto Eco

199. “Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how.”

— Umberto Eco

200. “If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns. – Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38.”

— Umberto Eco