823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.

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

At a certain historical moment, some people found the suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians. After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.

He thought he would become accustomed to the idea, not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

The maximum of confusion achieved with the maximum of order: it seems a sublime calculation.

Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image.