Quotes by Umberto Eco

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

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.

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.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

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.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

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.

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Translation is the art of failure.

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it.Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

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.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.