Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish... Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it. – From a ritual of Aleister Crowley.”

— Umberto Eco

252. “If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.”

— Umberto Eco

253. “The visitor enters and says, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?”... The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: “And more, dear sir, many more,” which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.”

— Umberto Eco

254. “Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.”

— Umberto Eco

255. “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

256. “I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.”

— Umberto Eco

257. “Nebulat ergo cogito.”

— Umberto Eco

258. “For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called “kosmos,” that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator who, as the Scriptures say, has decreed all things in number, weight, and measure.”

— Umberto Eco

259. “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

260. “The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.”

— Umberto Eco

261. “True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

— Umberto Eco

262. “This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.”

— Umberto Eco

263. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

285. “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

286. “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

287. “Superstition brings bad luck.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

293. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

295. “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

296. “Never trust originality.”

— Umberto Eco

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

300. “No importa la fe que ofrece determinado movimiento, sino la esperanza que propone.”

— Umberto Eco