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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

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
Like
Limits
Therefore
Humiliating
Thoughts
Discouraging
Dies
Escaping
Death
Limit
Ends
Assume
Way
Lists
Things
Assuming

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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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I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.
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He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
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Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.
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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.
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A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.
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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.
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By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.
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The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
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As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
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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.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.
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Simple mechanisms do not love.
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Libraries can take the place of God.
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A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.
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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.
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The followers must feel besieged.
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