823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

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.

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.

But metaphors set up not only similarities but also oppositions. A cup and a shield are alike in their form (round and concave), but opposite in their function (peace vs. war), just as Ares and Dionysus are alike insofar as they are gods, but opposite with regard to the ends they pursue and to the instruments they use.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.

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.

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.