823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.

Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.

I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines -- some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege -- I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words...

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

A human best, which is very little. Its hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.