Umberto Eco Quotes, Thoughts and images

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

To survive, you must tell stories.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Love is wiser than wisdom.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

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

The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

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

Books always speak of other books.

Translation is the art of failure.

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

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.