Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

— Umberto Eco

202. “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

203. “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

205. “The most interesting letters I received about ‘The Name of the Rose’ were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn’t understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.”

— Umberto Eco

206. “The Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.”

— Umberto Eco

207. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

209. “Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.”

— Umberto Eco

210. “I don’t miss my youth. I’m glad I had one, but I wouldn’t like to start over.”

— Umberto Eco

211. “Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.”

— Umberto Eco

212. “All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.”

— Umberto Eco

213. “I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.”

— Umberto Eco

214. “Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.”

— Umberto Eco

215. “History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.”

— Umberto Eco

216. “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

217. “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. This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them. This is why it has become a sink of iniquity.”

— Umberto Eco

218. “Diotallevi and Belbo, both from Piedmont, often claimed that any good Piedmontese had the ability to listen politely, look you in the eye, and say “You think so?” in a tone of such apparent sincerity that you immediately felt his profound disapproval.”

— Umberto Eco

219. “I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing. I’m living in my private world. And it’s a great sensation.”

— Umberto Eco

220. “A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.”

— Umberto Eco

221. “European identity, it seems, is only perceived by educated people. And that is sad, but it is a start.”

— Umberto Eco

222. “The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.”

— Umberto Eco

223. “Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.”

— Umberto Eco

224. “I’ve always said that I learned the English I know through two sources – Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.”

— Umberto Eco

225. “I sought peace in everything, but never was I happier than in a corner with a book.”

— Umberto Eco

226. “Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

228. “For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of “Is your novel an open work or not?” How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or “With which of your characters do you identify?” For God’s sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.”

— Umberto Eco

229. “The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

231. “Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

— Umberto Eco

232. “Jacopo Belbo didnt understand that he had had his moment and that it would have to be enough for him, for all his life. Not recognizing it, he spent the rest of his days seeking something else, until he damned himself.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

234. “As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

236. “But how does it happen,” I said with admiration, “that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?” “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

237. “My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.”

— Umberto Eco

238. “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible, he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn’t boast of his own death or of others’. But he doesn’t repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.”

— Umberto Eco

239. “The maximum of confusion achieved with the maximum of order: it seems a sublime calculation.”

— Umberto Eco

240. “If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to ‘dissolve’ harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.”

— Umberto Eco

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “Never trust originality.”

— Umberto Eco

245. “For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile – and without a blush – in steadfast virile seriousness.”

— Umberto Eco

246. “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

247. “There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.”

— Umberto Eco

248. “It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no discovery, because it knows already.”

— Umberto Eco

249. “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

250. “In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .”

— Umberto Eco