"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."
"You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don't love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends ... But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart."
12 likes
Source: Umberto Eco (2011). “The Prague Cemetery”, p.355, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Umberto Eco
"If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot."
"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."
"Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big."
"All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity."
"There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four."