823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.

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

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses

All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.

In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.