823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

La nostra identità non è fatta solo delle cose che ricordiamo, ma anche di ciò che riusciamo a dimenticare.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroadstations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an Americanpercolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes,served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like purespring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cupcontains more caffeine than four espressos.

Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.

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?

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.

تفكّرتُ في مقولةٍ نُسِبَت إلى مديرِ أوركسترا ، عُرِف بلسانه اللاذع ، متحدِّثًا عن عازف «فلان في جنسِهِ عظيم ، فلان مِن جنسِ القذارة»

What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.