Umberto Eco
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.Collection: Courage
The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.Collection: War
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.Collection: Smile
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.Collection: Attitude
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.Collection: Dreams
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Sad
Beauty is boring because it is predictable.Collection: Beauty
Translation is the art of failure.Collection: Failure
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.Collection: Truth
Our life is full of empty space.Collection: Space
Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Fear
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Communication
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.Collection: Dreams
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.Collection: Humor
We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.Collection: Car
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.Collection: Poetry
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
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.
The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
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.
We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.
The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
We like lists because we don't want to die.
The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
Human beings are religious animals.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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.
Libraries can take the place of God.
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.
There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
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.
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
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.
I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.