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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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
Invent
Lies
Produce
Possible
Lying
World
More quotes by Umberto Eco
I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
Umberto Eco
He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
Umberto Eco
I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
Umberto Eco
They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I'm a cat that hit its nose.
Umberto Eco
The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
Umberto Eco
Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
Umberto Eco
Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
Umberto Eco
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
Umberto Eco
From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.
Umberto Eco
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.
Umberto Eco
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
Umberto Eco
A secret is powerful when it is empty.
Umberto Eco
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maidens?
Umberto Eco
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
Umberto Eco
I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
Umberto Eco
Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.
Umberto Eco
Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
Umberto Eco
There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
Umberto Eco
For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - le suggérer, voilà le rêve!).
Umberto Eco
