Top 400 Umberto Eco Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “We’ve been led astray by rationalist thought,” Diotallevi said. “I keep telling you.”

— Umberto Eco

352. “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

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

— Umberto Eco

354. “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

355. “When a spy sells something entirely new, all he needs to do is recount something you could find in any second-hand book stall.”

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

357. “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

358. “The Fundamental Principle that governs – or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.”

— Umberto Eco

359. “But it was the newspapers that called John XXIII the Good Pope, and the people followed suit.” “That’s right. Newspapers teach people how to think,” Simei said. “But do newspapers follow trends or create trends?” “They do both, Signorina Fresia. People don’t know what the trends are, so we tell them, then they know. But let’s not get too involved in philosophy – we’re professionals. Carry on, Colonna.”

— Umberto Eco

360. “And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?”

— Umberto Eco

361. “In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety.”

— Umberto Eco

362. “The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer.”

— Umberto Eco

363. “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

364. “So Italy was invaded by these Fraticelli or Friars of the Poor Life, whom many considered dangerous. At this point it was difficult to distinguish the spiritual masters, who maintained contact with the ecclesiastical authorities, from their simpler followers, who now lived outside the order, begging for alms and existing from day to day by the labor of their hands, holding no property of any kind.”

— Umberto Eco

365. “Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.”

— Umberto Eco

366. “The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.”

— Umberto Eco

367. “Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.”

— Umberto Eco

368. “An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.”

— Umberto Eco

369. “We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.”

— Umberto Eco

370. “To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.”

— Umberto Eco

371. “It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.”

— Umberto Eco

372. “I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.”

— Umberto Eco

373. “I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.”

— Umberto Eco

374. “I dreamed what all losers dream, about one day writing a book that would bring me fame and fortune.”

— Umberto Eco

375. “And from this springs the extraordinary question: Did the Egyptians know about electricity?”

— Umberto Eco

376. “If culture did not filter, it would be inane – as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.”

— Umberto Eco

377. “And he continues: “Thus it is increasingly necessary you recognize that other congregations of material bodies exist elsewhere in the universe, like this of our world, which the ether encircles in eager embrace.”

— Umberto Eco

378. “But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.”

— Umberto Eco

379. “What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?”

— Umberto Eco

380. “I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.”

— Umberto Eco

381. “Madmen and children always speak the truth.”

— Umberto Eco

382. “William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn’t understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound.”

— Umberto Eco

383. “In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it.”

— Umberto Eco

384. “Dissimulation is not fraud. It is an effort not to show things as they are. And it is a difficult effort: when we excel, others must not recognize our excellence. If someone were to become famous for his ability to disguise himself, as actors do, all would know that he is what he pretends to be. But concerning the true, excellent dissimulators, who have existed and exist still, we have no information.”

— Umberto Eco

385. “Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.”

— Umberto Eco

386. “A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”

— Umberto Eco

387. “Every text, after all, is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work. What a problem it would be if a text were to say everything the receiver is to understand – it would never end.”

— Umberto Eco

388. “Do we really have to talk about professionalism? Everyone here is a professional. A master builder who puts up a wall that hasn’t collapsed is certainly acting professionally, but professionalism ought to be the norm, and we should only be talking about the dodgy builder who puts up a wall that doesn’t collapse... This insistence on professionalism, that it is something special, makes it sound as if people are generally lousy workers.”

— Umberto Eco

389. “In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.”

— Umberto Eco

390. “The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn’t know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn’t know that a few seconds before winning I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose.”

— Umberto Eco

391. “Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion?”

— Umberto Eco

392. “We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William – with his new glasses on his nose – could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.”

— Umberto Eco

393. “The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.”

— Umberto Eco

394. “You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was – full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.”

— Umberto Eco

395. “We don’t see them, but, invisible, they act all around us.”

— Umberto Eco

396. “But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors’ myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author’s ordaining and limiting them in advance.”

— Umberto Eco

397. “Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.”

— Umberto Eco

398. “For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.”

— Umberto Eco

399. “Terrorism is not the enemy of the great systems; on the contrary, it is their natural counterweight, accepted, programmed.”

— Umberto Eco

400. “That is a real attitude – to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.”

— Umberto Eco