Quote

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

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
Teaches
Recognize
Please
Teach
Story
Purpose
Stories
World
Snares

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
Umberto Eco
Image
On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?
Umberto Eco
Image
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Umberto Eco
Image
Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.
Umberto Eco
Image
In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
Umberto Eco
Image
Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.
Umberto Eco
Image
I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
Umberto Eco
Image
The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
Umberto Eco
Image
Then we are living in a place abandoned by God, I said, disheartened. Have you found any places where God would have felt at home? William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Umberto Eco
Image
Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
Umberto Eco
Image
I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
Umberto Eco
Image
I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.
Umberto Eco
Image
Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.
Umberto Eco
Image
but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
Umberto Eco
Image
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
Umberto Eco
Image
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco
Image
In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Umberto Eco
Image
Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.
Umberto Eco
Image
Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
Umberto Eco
Image
If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.
Umberto Eco