Umberto Eco Quotes
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The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.
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Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
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They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?
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Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
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Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
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Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
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Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
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I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
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In this world you either read or write, and writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.
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As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
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I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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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.
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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.
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Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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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.
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The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.