Eco Mind Quotes & Sayings

Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. — Umberto Eco

China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice. Everybody can be subjected to harm. I'm just a citizen: my life is equal in value to any other. But I'm thankful that when I lost my freedom so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort into helping me. — Ai Weiwei

That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity. — Umberto Eco

I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-woo l possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant. — Frances Moore Lappe

With an eco-mind, we get ready for surprises, for we realize it's just not possible to know what's possible. — Frances Moore Lappe

Some would argue that you're as successful as the company you keep. Certainly there is a connection between our friends and who we are. — Simon Sinek

But it's atheists who say that the world wasn't made by anyone, and you say you're not an atheist . . ."
I'm not because I can't bring myself to believe that all these things we see around us - the way trees and fruits grow, and the solar system, and our brains - came about by chance. They're too well made. And therefore there must have been a creating mind. God. — Umberto Eco

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony. — W. Somerset Maugham

Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose ... not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain. — Frances Moore Lappe

If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind. — Umberto Eco

Whether we like it or not we are consideably bound to Europe. — Stanley Baldwin

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him. — Umberto Eco

I never did love Hollywood, I just loved the work. — Bronson Pinchot

you must not worry if they do not yet exist, because that does not mean they will not exist later. And I say to you that God wishes them to be, and certainly they already are in His mind, even if my friend from Occam denies that ideas exist in such a way; and I do not say this because we can determine the divine nature but precisely because we cannot set any limit to it. — Umberto Eco

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. — Umberto Eco

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book. — James Salter

They're still there," Salon said. "Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us, right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who directed the excavations?" "Expert engineers, I'd say." "Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books ... How many Jews are there among your authors?" "We don't ask our authors to fill out racial forms," I replied stiffly. "You mustn't think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends ... I have in mind a certain kind of Jew ... " "What kind?" "I know what kind ... — Umberto Eco

If you have a good idea, open your mouth and say something else. — Keith Johnstone

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

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. — Umberto Eco