Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .”

— Umberto Eco

252. “Accordingly, the choice between a literature review and a research thesis is linked to the student’s ability and maturity. And regrettably, it is often linked to financial factors, because a working student certainly has less time and energy to dedicate to long hours of research and trips to foreign research institutes or libraries, and often lacks money for the purchase of rare and expensive books and other resources.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

254. “But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”

— Umberto Eco

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

258. “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

259. “And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.”

— Umberto Eco

260. “But chance has a taste for conspiracy.”

— Umberto Eco

261. “The cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.”

— Umberto Eco

262. “I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”

— Umberto Eco

263. “I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion – which I could see he always harbored – that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.”

— Umberto Eco

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

267. “My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

269. “Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

271. “Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school’s aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”

— Umberto Eco

272. “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

273. “Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image.”

— Umberto Eco

274. “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

275. “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

276. “Superstition brings bad luck.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

280. “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. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels. Everything is diverted from its proper course.”

— Umberto Eco

281. “He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.”

— Umberto Eco

282. “The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines – mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. – so news drowns in a great sea of information.”

— Umberto Eco

283. “The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.”

— Umberto Eco

284. “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

285. “Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.”

— Umberto Eco

286. “I should be at peace. I have understood. Don’t some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and truimph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys...”

— Umberto Eco

287. “What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.”

— Umberto Eco

288. “Because if the Masters of the World exist, they can only be underground: this is a truth that all sense but few dare utter. Perhaps.”

— Umberto Eco

289. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

291. “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

292. “As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil.”

— Umberto Eco

293. “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

294. “I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

296. “With Germans, as with women, you never get to the point.”

— Umberto Eco

297. “If somebody writes a book and doesn’t care for the survival of that book, he’s an imbecile.”

— Umberto Eco

298. “When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.”

— Umberto Eco

299. “Vallet wrote of something else. Stimulated in some mysterious way by what he was saying, I made that connection myself and, and as I identified the idea with the text I was underlining, I attributed it to Vallet. And for more than twenty years I had been grateful to the old abbot for something he had never given me. I had produced the magic key on my own.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco