Umberto Eco Quotes
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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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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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 have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
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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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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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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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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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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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Translation is the art of failure.
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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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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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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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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
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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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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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A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.