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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Essayist
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Semiotician
Translator
Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
Oumperto Eko
Eco Umberto
U. Eco
Whole
Attempt
Pendulums
Made
Mad
Enigma
Believe
Humorous
Existentialism
Life
Terrible
Harmless
World
Powerful
Underlying
Though
Interpret
Truth
Existential
Come
Witty
Semiotics

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The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
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There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
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And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
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Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
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The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
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Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
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Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country
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I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.
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I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.
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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.
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I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
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I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
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I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
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American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC
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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past it passes out memories generously like a great lord it doesn't have to pursue the real thing.
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And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.
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The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
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