823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

Cartea a dovedit ce poate, și nu vedem un alt obiect mai bun pe care l-am putea crea pentru aceeași întrebuințare.

...: through witty riddles and unsuspected metaphors, though ti tells us things differently to the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just as things are, and I dint know it.

In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Με άλλα λόγια, κάθε βιβλίο ήταν γι' αυτόν σαν ένα μυθικό ζώο που συναντούσε σε μια άγνωστη χώρα.

Fire is therefore too many things and – as well as being a psychological phenomenon – it becomes a symbol, and like all symbols it is ambiguous, polysemic and evokes different meanings according to the situation.

The sign is not concerned with that smoke and that fire, but with the possibility of a relationship between antecedent and consequent regulating of any occurrence of the smoke (and of the fire). The sign is type, not occurrence.

The lamp fell right on the pile of books that had been knocked from the table all in a heap, lying open. The oil spilled out, the fire immediately seized a fragile parchment, which blazed up like a bundle of dry twigs. Everything happened in a few moments, as for centuries those ancient pages had been yearning for arson and were rejoicing in the sudden satisfaction of an immemorial thirst for ecpyrosis.