Umberto Eco

“Jangan percaya begitu saja pada apa yang disebut sebagai sejarah”

“You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.”

“« Les hommes ne font jamais le mal aussi complètement et ardemment que lorsqu'ils le font par conviction religieuse. » (p. 26)”

“Usually the recipe for a bestseller is to give people what they want. My challenge is and was: Give them what they do not expect. Be severe with them. The world of media is full of easy answers, wash-and-wear philosophies, instant ecstacies, what-me-worry Epiphanies. Probably readers want a little more.”

“You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don’t love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends … But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he’s always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.”

“The flame consists of a splendid clarity, of an unusual vigor, and od an ingenious ardor, but possesses the splendid clarity that it may illuminate and the ingenious ardor that it may burn.”

“Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.”

“It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating ...”

“A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.”

“Will we be happier afterwards? Or will be have lost the freshness of those who are privileged to experience art as real life, where we enter after the trumps have been played, and we leave without knowing who's going to win or lose the game?”

“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”

“Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”

“L'essere umano è davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato città, scritto magnifiche poesie, dato interpretazioni del mondo, inventato mitologie etc... Ma allo stesso tempo non ha smesso di fare la guerra ai suoi simili, non ha smesso di ingannarsi, di distruggere l'ambiente circostante. La somma algebrica fra vigore intellettuale e coglioneria dà un risultato quasi nullo. Dunque, decidendo di parlare di imbecillità, rendiamo in un certo senso omaggio a questa creatura che è per metà geniale, per metà imbecille”

“Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”

“luther, he ruined the bible by translating it into their own language.”

“Atât de mare e puterea adevărului care, precum binele, se răspândește de la sine.”

“Cartea a dovedit ce poate, și nu vedem un alt obiect mai bun pe care l-am putea crea pentru aceeași întrebuințare.”

“I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, butwe don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.”

“How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched bythe often perverse wisdom of man!”

“The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.”

“Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.”

“A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.”

“Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.”

“For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.”

“Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?”

“When a spy sells something entirely new, all he needs to do is recount something you could find in any second-hand book stall.”

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”

“William was deeply humiliated. I tried to comfort him; I told him that for three days he had been looking for a text in Greek and it was natural in the course of his examination for him to discard all books not in Greek. And he answered that it is certainly human to make mistakes, but there are some human beings who make more than others, and they are called fools, and he was one of them, and he wondered whether it was worth the effort to study in Paris and Oxford if one was then incapable of thinking that manuscripts are also bound in groups, a fact even novices know, except stupid ones like me, and a pair of clowns like the two of us would be a great success at fairs, and that was what we should do instead of trying to solve mysteries, especially when we were up against people far more clever than we.”

“Öyle bir an geliyor ki,insanın içinde bir şeyler kırılıyor;ne enerji ne istek kalıyor. Yaşamak gerekir diyorlar ama yaşamak son vadede intihara sürükleyen bir sorun”

“I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties.”

“-Es inútil, ya no tenemos la sabiduría de los antiguos, ¡se acabó la época de los gigantes!-Somos enanos -admitió Guillermo-, pero enanos subidos a los hombros de aquellos gigantes, y, aunque pequeños, a veces logramos ver más allá de su horizonte.”

“Porque de tres cosas depende la belleza: en primer lugar, de la integridad o perfección, y por eso consideramos feo lo incompleto; luego, de la justa proporción, o sea de la consonancia; por último, de la claridad y la luz.”

“-Es un hombre... extraño.-Es, o ha sido, en muchos aspectos, un gran hombre. Pero precisamente por eso es extraño. Sólo los hombres pequeños parecen normales.”

“El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.”

“Rzeczywiście, często się zdarza, że idzie się do biblioteki, bo chce się książkę o znanym tytule, ale główną funkcją biblioteki, a przynajmniej funkcją biblioteki w moim domu i w domach wszystkich znajomych, jakich możemy odwiedzać, jest odkrywanie książek, których istnienia się nie podejrzewało, a które, jak się okazuje, są dla nas niezwykle ważne.”

“Heden ten dage verstaat men onder vrijheid echter de mogelijkheid om de geloofsovertuiging en de mening te kiezen die je het meest aanstaat en die allemaal inwisselbaar zijn - en het maakt de staat niet uit of je vrijmetselaar, christen, Jood of een volgeling van de Grote Turk bent. Zo wordt men onverschillig jegens de Waarheid.”

“And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.”

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

“I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.”

“From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola”

“But can I really will anything? At this moment I feel the pleasure of being stone, the sun warms me, the wind makes acceptable this adjustment of my body, I have no intention of ceasing to be a stone. Why? Because I like it. So then I too am slave to a passion, which advises me against wanting freely its opposite. However, willing, I could will. And yet I do not. How much freer am I than a stone?”

“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.”

“I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are to soft or downright liquid.I was seeing my shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest - your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor's, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed. Of course, there are such things as secret thoughts... but in general thoughts too are revealed.Shit, however, is not. Except for an extremely brief period of your life, when your mother is still changing your diapers, it is all yours. And since my shit at that moment must not have been all that different from what I had produced over the course of my past life, I was in that instant reuniting with my old, forgotten self, undergoing the first experience capable of merging with countless previous experiences, even those from when I did my business in the vineyards as a boy.Perhaps if I took a god look around, I would find the remains of those shits past, and then, triangulating properly, Clarabelle's treasure.But I stopped there. Shit was not my linden-blossom tea, of course not, how could I have expected to conduct my recherche with my sphincter? In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions.And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since reawakening. The ways of the Lord are infinite, I said to myself, they go even through the butthole.”

“But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.”

“Os homens nunca praticam o mal tão completa e entusiasticamente como quando o fazem por convicção religiosa.”

“A civilização não chegará à perfeição enquanto a última pedra da última igreja não tiver caído sobre o último padre, e a Terra tiver sido libertada daquela escória.”

“It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.”

“Für jedes komplexe Problem gibt es eine einfache Lösung, und die ist die falsche.”

“The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?”

“[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.”