Umberto Eco Quotes
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
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I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
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I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.
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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said
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Translation is the art of failure.
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Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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I don't even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.
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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
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I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
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The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
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Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.