Umberto Eco Quotes
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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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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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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
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The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
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You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
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The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
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Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
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There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
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To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.
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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
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It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
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You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
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History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
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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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Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
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Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.