Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “For the male who dominates and writes, or by writing dominates, the woman has always been portrayed with hostility from the earliest times. Let us not be deceived by angelic descriptions of women. On the contrary, precisely because great literature is dominated by sweet, gentle creatures, the world of satire – which is that of the popular imagination – continually demonizes the woman, from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to modern times.”

— Umberto Eco

307. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

309. “There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.”

— Umberto Eco

310. “New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn’t have to pursue “the real thing.””

— Umberto Eco

311. “I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.”

— Umberto Eco

312. “I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.”

— Umberto Eco

313. “Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

315. “I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

317. “Rather, they prove that students can make something out of their education.”

— Umberto Eco

318. “And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?”

— Umberto Eco

319. “Sometimes my characters are not myself.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

322. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

324. “Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.”

— Umberto Eco

325. “I don’t want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don’t fall into the trap of starting a new novel.”

— Umberto Eco

326. “I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.”

— Umberto Eco

327. “One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.”

— Umberto Eco

328. “The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.”

— Umberto Eco

329. “The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn’t always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.”

— Umberto Eco

330. “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

331. “I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.”

— Umberto Eco

332. “Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said.”

— Umberto Eco

333. “The book has to give the idea of another kind of newspaper, has to show how I labored away for a year to create a model of journalism independent of all pressure, implying that the venture failed because it was impossible to have a free voice.”

— Umberto Eco

334. “All the world’s follies,” he replied, “turn up in publishing houses sooner or later. But the world’s follies may also contain flashes of the wisdom of the Most High, so the wise man observes folly with humility.” Then.”

— Umberto Eco

335. “Pengetahuan Tuhan mewujud dalam pengetahuan manusia.”

— Umberto Eco

336. “The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery.”

— Umberto Eco

337. “Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.”

— Umberto Eco

338. “Nothing can dispel from my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute Optimism.”

— Umberto Eco

339. “It is certainly human to make mistakes, but there are some human beings who make more than others, and they are called fools.”

— Umberto Eco

340. “You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it’s a memory that you’ve given me. I’ll remember the photo from now on, but not them.”

— Umberto Eco

341. “I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”

— Umberto Eco

342. “I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.”

— Umberto Eco

343. “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

344. “Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.”

— Umberto Eco

345. “I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all and noting, at once cause and effect.”

— Umberto Eco

346. “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

347. “It seems to me that more plots have been imagined than really exist.”

— Umberto Eco

348. “Y cuando vives cultivando esperanzas imposibles, ya eres un perdedor. Y cuando te das cuenta, te hundes.”

— Umberto Eco

349. “Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.”

— Umberto Eco

350. “There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor.”

— Umberto Eco