Quote

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.

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
Writing
Lost
Building
Death
Cities
Remedy
Away
Example
Decades
Makes
Working
Sadness
Moments
Moment
Throw
Thought
Pain
Spent
Feel
Fear
Waste
Feels
Experience
Painting

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
Umberto Eco
Image
Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.
Umberto Eco
Image
Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
Umberto Eco
Image
If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
Umberto Eco
Image
The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.
Umberto Eco
Image
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.
Umberto Eco
Image
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
Umberto Eco
Image
Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
Umberto Eco
Image
I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
Umberto Eco
Image
There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
Umberto Eco
Image
The good of a book lies in its being read.
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
American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC
Umberto Eco
Image
The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
Umberto Eco
Image
Sometimes my characters are not myself.
Umberto Eco
Image
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
Umberto Eco
Image
A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
Umberto Eco