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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
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
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Screenwriter
Semiotician
Translator
Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
Oumperto Eko
Eco Umberto
U. Eco
States
Sinner
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Latin
Person
Ethics
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Catholic
Good
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Ethic
Success
Mythology
More quotes by Umberto Eco
If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.
Umberto Eco
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Umberto Eco
But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed? I asked, for no good reason. Is Jorge right? Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .
Umberto Eco
A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable.
Umberto Eco
Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.
Umberto Eco
Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
Umberto Eco
Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
Umberto Eco
Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.
Umberto Eco
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
Umberto Eco
Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
Umberto Eco
The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
Umberto Eco
Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
Then why do you want to know? Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
Umberto Eco
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
Umberto Eco
Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.
Umberto Eco
There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
Umberto Eco
I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
Umberto Eco
Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
Umberto Eco
