823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries....

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.