Quote

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

Umberto Eco

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Occult
Confirm
Followers
Already
Learned
Believe
Things

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
[I am fascinated by stupidity] because normal intelligence is boring. Two plus two makes four - finished. You have no possibilities! Stupidity is infinite. Two plus two can make billions of different numbers.
Umberto Eco
Image
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
Umberto Eco
Image
In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
Umberto Eco
Image
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands
Umberto Eco
Image
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
Umberto Eco
Image
All the theories of conspiracy were always a way to escape our responsibilities. It is a very important kind of social sickness by which we avoid recognizing reality such as it is and avoid our responsibilities.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
Umberto Eco
Image
Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
Umberto Eco
Image
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.
Umberto Eco
Image
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, We don't know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning. So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
Umberto Eco
Image
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
Umberto Eco
Image
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
Umberto Eco
Image
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
Umberto Eco