823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish... Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it. – From a ritual of Aleister Crowley.

I know nothing. There is nothing that I know. But the heart senses certain things. Let your heart speak, question faces, do not listen to tongues.

I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But 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.

I don’t see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

What does the philosopher say? Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am.

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don’t know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us – but is living close to us.

Vallet wrote of something else. Stimulated in some mysterious way by what he was saying, I made that connection myself and, and as I identified the idea with the text I was underlining, I attributed it to Vallet. And for more than twenty years I had been grateful to the old abbot for something he had never given me. I had produced the magic key on my own.

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing. I’m living in my private world. And it’s a great sensation.

Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?” “Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.” “In Paris do they always have the true answer?” “Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.