Famous Umberto Eco Quotations

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"The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it."
by Umberto Eco
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
by Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
"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."
by Umberto Eco
"Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry."
by Umberto Eco
"I felt like poisoning a monk."
by Umberto Eco
"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."
by Umberto Eco
"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."
by Umberto Eco
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
by Umberto Eco
"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."
by Umberto Eco
"And we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything."
by Umberto Eco
"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."
by Umberto Eco
"A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams."
by Umberto Eco
"In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness."
by Umberto Eco
"The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell -- in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond."
by Umberto Eco
"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed."
by Umberto Eco
"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."
by Umberto Eco
"There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him."
by Umberto Eco
"I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe. But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . . What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."
by Umberto Eco


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