Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.”

— Umberto Eco

302. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

317. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “Sometimes my characters are not myself.”

— Umberto Eco

331. “Pengetahuan Tuhan mewujud dalam pengetahuan manusia.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

339. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

341. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

343. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

— Umberto Eco