"Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message."
Read quote
4 likes
Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 10 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer."
Read quote
4 likes
"A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles."
Read quote
4 likes
"The hand of God creates; it does not conceal."
Read quote
4 likes
"Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types."
Read quote
4 likes
"Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want."
Read quote
4 likes
"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.""
Read quote
4 likes
"The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?"
Read quote
4 likes
"There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read."
Read quote
3 likes
"Beauty is boring because it is predictable."
Read quote
3 likes
"Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity."
Read quote
3 likes
"Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad."
Read quote
3 likes
"A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information."
Read quote
3 likes
"Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry."
Read quote
3 likes
"Living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss."
Read quote
3 likes
"[I am fascinated by stupidity] because normal intelligence is boring. Two plus two makes four - finished. You have no possibilities! Stupidity is infinite. Two plus two can make billions of different numbers."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes