Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

205. “I’d lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there’s always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.”

— Umberto Eco

206. “People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.”

— Umberto Eco

207. “The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.”

— Umberto Eco

208. “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

209. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

210. “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

211. “I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.”

— Umberto Eco

212. “It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.”

— Umberto Eco

213. “It comes down to a question of attention: it’s difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.”

— Umberto Eco

214. “The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances.”

— Umberto Eco

215. “Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it.”

— Umberto Eco

216. “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

217. “Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.”

— Umberto Eco

218. “When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Book Quotes

219. “I lost myself in the contemplation of nature, trying to forget my thoughts and to look only at beings as they appear, and to forget myself, joyfully, in the sight of them.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

221. “If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic.”

— Umberto Eco

222. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

223. “Simple mechanisms do not love.”

— Umberto Eco

224. “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

225. “If there is something paradoxical, in the sense of curious or bizarre, it is that the word paradox has two fairly different meanings: one which is used in logic and philosophy, and the other in rhetoric.”

— Umberto Eco

226. “The followers must feel besieged.”

— Umberto Eco

227. “Creo que, a ciertas alturas, ya no hay diferencia entre acostumbrarse a fingir que se cree y acostumbrarse a creer.”

— Umberto Eco

228. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

230. “In other words, although I don’t like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

232. “We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Real Quotes

233. “Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.”

— Umberto Eco

234. “To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it’s possible to understand something about truth.”

— Umberto Eco

235. “The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn’t exist.”

— Umberto Eco

236. “The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.”

— Umberto Eco

237. “If God existed, he would be a library.”

— Umberto Eco

238. “Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.”

— Umberto Eco

239. “Omnia mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum.”

— Umberto Eco

240. “I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays.”

— Umberto Eco

241. “What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.”

— Umberto Eco

242. “The Templars realized that the secret lay not only in possessing the global map of the currents, but also in knowing the critical point, the Omphalos, the Umbilicus Telluris, the Navel of the World, the Source of Command.”

— Umberto Eco

243. “In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.”

— Umberto Eco

244. “Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?”

— Umberto Eco

245. “But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.”

— Umberto Eco

246. “I’m always fascinated by losers. Also, in my “Foucault’s Pendulum,” the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.”

— Umberto Eco

247. “Having reached the end of my poor sinner’s life, my hair now white, I grow old as the world does, waiting to be lost in the bottomless pit of silent and deserted divinity, sharing in the light of angelic intelligences;.”

— Umberto Eco

248. “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”

— Umberto Eco

Featured in: Real Quotes

249. “The “thesis neurosis” has begun: the student abandons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate.”

— Umberto Eco

250. “The German lives in a state of perpetual intestinal embarrassment due to an excess of beer and the pork sausages on which he gorges himself.”

— Umberto Eco