Quotes By Author: Umberto Eco
“…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.”
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“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters’ snares.””So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.””What a disappointment,” I said. “I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood?”
“Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeugung tun.”
“El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.”
“I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.”
“From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola”
“Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?”
“In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.”
“In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. 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. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.”
“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”
“I felt like poisoning a monk.”
“But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”
“When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.”
“The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God’s will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions.”