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Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

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
Humans
Message
Gibberish
Thinking
Whenever
Wizard
Messages
Spends
Poet
Wizards
Century
Preacher
Race
Centuries
Religion
Chief
Human
Chiefs
Deciphering

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[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
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Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.
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For, I must tell you, in this world where today all lose their minds over many & wondrous Machines - some of which, alas, you can see also in this Siege - I construct Aristotelian Machines, that allow anyone to see with Words.
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I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
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Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.
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Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!
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Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
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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.
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A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
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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?
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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).
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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Today I realize that many recent exercises in deconstructive reading read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
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Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.
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but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
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A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
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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.
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Books always speak of other books.
Umberto Eco