Umberto Quotes & Sayings

The walls were draped with banners covered with cabalistic signs, an abundance of owls of all kinds, scarabs and ibises, and Oriental divinities of uncertain origin. Near the rear wall was a dais, a proscenium of burning torches held up by rough logs, and in the background an altar with a triangular altarpiece and statuettes of Isis and Osiris. The room was ringed by an amphitheater of figures of Anubis, and there was a portrait of Cagliostro (it could hardly have been of anyone else, could it?), a gilded mummy in Cheops format, two five-armed candelabra, a gong suspended from two rampant snakes, on a podium a lectern covered by calico printed with hieroglyphics, and two crowns, two tripods, a little portable sarcophagus, a throne, a fake seventeenth-century fauteuil, four unmatched chairs suitable for a banquet with the sheriff of Nottingham, and candles, tapers, votive lights, all flickering very spiritually. — Umberto Eco

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades. — Umberto Eco

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace. — Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And then my chance really happened in 1996 when we added the second flight of the tether satellite. — Umberto Guidoni

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

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne. — Umberto Eco

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility? — Umberto Eco

It will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing. — Umberto Boccioni

Well, we have two major goals. The most important one is to get the station arm on board the station, because that's this really milestone in the space station building since from now on they will be using this arm to continue building the space station. — Umberto Guidoni

Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text. — Umberto Eco

To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy — Umberto Eco

At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books. — Umberto Eco

For what I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics. — Umberto Eco

And if it is possible that creatures live underwater, could not creatures also live under the earth, nations of salamanders capable of arriving, through their tunnels, at the central fire that animates the planet? — Umberto Eco

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. — Umberto Eco

Then it is he who has sinned, not me. If I had to start worrying whether the client might be lying, I would no longer be in this profession, which is based on trust. — Umberto Eco

And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight. — Umberto Guidoni

They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. — Umberto Eco

Human beings are religious animals. — Umberto Eco

What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves? — Umberto Eco

What am I? ... I say so inasmuch as I am the memory of all my past moments, the sum of everything I remember. If I say I in the sense of that something that is here at this moment and is not the mainmast or the coral, then I am the sum of what I feel now. But what is what I feel now? It is the sum of those relations between presumed indivisibles that have been arranged in that system of relations in that special order that is my body. — Umberto Eco

You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus. — Umberto Eco

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

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell - in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond. — Umberto Eco

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources
Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake. — Umberto Eco

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ... The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office. — Umberto Eco

I hadn't taken to the colonel, yet he had piqued my interest. You can be fascinated even by a tree frog if you watch it long enough. I was savoring the first drops of the poison that would carry us all to perdition. — Umberto Eco

But I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric. — Umberto Eco

Luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene. — Umberto Eco

An we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness an that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything. — Umberto Eco

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

The library is testimony to truth and to error, — Umberto Eco

when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us. — Umberto Eco

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think ... and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone ... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself. — Umberto Eco

These days I am obsessed by sculpture! I believe I have glimpsed a complete renovation of that mummified art. — Umberto Boccioni

someone has mixed and shuffled the words of the Book more than was right. — Umberto Eco

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world. — Umberto Eco

Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room. — Umberto Eco

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

In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls. — Umberto Eco

In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69) ... For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car ... It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. — Umberto Eco

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed. — Umberto Eco

The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with. — Umberto Eco

I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that. — Umberto Eco

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa. — Umberto Eco

The "thesis neurosis" has begun: the student abandons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate. — Umberto Eco

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. — Umberto Eco

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. — Umberto Eco

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

Not that he felt any particular love for himself, but his dislike of others induced him to make the best of his own company. — Umberto Eco

I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work. — Umberto Eco

For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us. — Umberto Eco

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter ... one must paint its atmosphere. — Umberto Boccioni

I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest. — Umberto Eco

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

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

The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less
I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and
as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,
without asking too many questions. — Umberto Eco

Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature's ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself. — Umberto Eco

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning. — Umberto Eco

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original. — Umberto Eco

Love is wiser than wisdom. — Umberto Eco

The trouble is," I said, "I can no longer distinguish the accidental difference among Waldensians, Catharists, the poor of Lyons, the Umiliati, the Beghards, Joachimites, Patarines, Apostles, Poor Lombards, Arnoldists, Williamites, Followers of the Free Spirit, and Luciferines. What — Umberto Eco

Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motorbus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the bus and are blended with it. — Umberto Boccioni

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

The person who doesn't read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards. — Umberto Eco

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world. — Umberto Eco

I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22. — Umberto Eco

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. — Umberto Eco

And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: 'Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatas.' ... The words all begin with the same letter!"
"The men of my islands are all a bit mad," William said proudly. — Umberto Eco

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. — Umberto Eco

Facilis. You take the cheese before it is too antiquum, without too much salis, and cut in cubes or sicut you like. And postea you put a bit of butierro or lardo to rechauffeur over the embers. And in it you put two pieces of cheese, and when it becomes tenero, zucharum et cinnamon supra positurum du bis. And immediately take to table, because it must be ate caldo caldo. - Salvatore — Umberto Eco

And on the moon there is surely water ... And up there, if water exists, and air, then so does life.
A life perhaps different from ours. Perhaps that water has the flavor of (let us say) glycyrrhizin, or cardamon, or even of pepper. If there are infinite worlds, this proves the infinite ingenuity of the Engineer of our Universe, but then there is no limit to this Poet. He can have created inhabited worlds everywhere, but inhabited by ever-different creatures. Perhaps the inhabitants of the sun are sunnier, brighter, and more illuminated than are the inhabitants of the earth, who are heavy with matter, and the inhabitants of the moon lie somewhere in between. On the sun live beings who are all Form, or all Act, if you prefer, while on the earth beings are made of mere Potentials that evolve, and on the moon they are in medio fluctuantes, lunatics, so to speak ... — Umberto Eco

At university (then, though still, I understand, today), things are the opposite of the ways of the normal world: it isn't the sons who hate the fathers, but the fathers who hate the sons. — Umberto Eco

So we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil. — Umberto Eco

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

Often books speak of books. — Umberto Eco

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness. — Umberto Eco

If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic. — Umberto Eco

At that point, there will be the handover between the shuttle arm and the station arm so that the shuttle arm will take the cradle and put it into the cargo bay. — Umberto Guidoni

Rather than giving out information someone would be able to check, it's better to limit yourself to insinuation. — Umberto Eco

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. — Umberto Eco

I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way. — Umberto Eco

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

Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other. They touch each other sensually, they kiss each other's breasts lightly, with the tip of the tongue. — Umberto Eco

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. — Umberto Eco

You'll come back To me ... It's written in the stars, you see, you'll come back. You'll come back, it's a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you. — Umberto Eco

By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction. — Umberto Eco

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits. — Umberto Eco

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body. — Umberto Eco

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian. — Umberto Eco

But, what we need to get out of the first EVA is to have the arm completely unfolded and powered so that they can keep the temperature under control. That will really the call of the first EVA. — Umberto Guidoni

Adso of Melk: The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book ...
William of Baskerville: A book containing a wisdom different from ours. — Umberto Eco

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. 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, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path is tortuous. — Umberto Eco

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor. — Umberto Eco

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy? — Umberto Eco

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with. — Umberto Eco

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs. — Umberto Eco

The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances. — Umberto Eco

It seems to me that more plots have been imagined than really exist. — Umberto Eco