823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.

..the kind of influence printing has had on modern sensibility… : the shattering of the intellectual experience into uniform and repeatable units, the establishment of a sense of homogeneity and continuity that generated, at a distance of centuries, the assembly line, and presided over the ideology of the mechanical age, as well as the cosmology of infinitesimal calculation.

Do not laugh too much at your fellows. Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.

مَن يقرأ الكتب التي تتحدث عنها الصُّحُف ؟في العادةِ لا يقرؤُها حتىٰ مَن كتب عنها ، إلّا مَن كتبها ، وَ ليس ذلك مؤكَّدًا ، وَ عند قراءة بعض الكتب يبدو أحيانًا أنّ كاتبها لم يقرأها

They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.

…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret.