823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.

To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, “We don’t know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning.” So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.

In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form.

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays.

If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns. – Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38.

The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.