Umberto D Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

I'd never understood whether the vogue for apologising is a sign of humility of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologise and wash your hands of it. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d'Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it's an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege. — Umberto Eco

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

I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us. — Umberto Eco

I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief. — Vittorio De Sica

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism. — Umberto Eco

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

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

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

Often books speak of books. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love is wiser than wisdom. — Umberto Eco