Quote

The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless.

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
Four
Machines
Uncles
Sure
Build
Techniques
Though
Completely
Belongs
Doesn
Seem
Department
Greeting
Art
Hair
Useless
Hairs
Seems
Example
Technique
Greetings
Way
Ways
Somehow
Splitting
Since
Saved
Mechanical

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
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
An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
Umberto Eco
Image
The hand of God creates it does not conceal.
Umberto Eco
Image
You cannot believe what you are saying. Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.
Umberto Eco
Image
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Umberto Eco
Image
He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
Umberto Eco
Image
What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
Umberto Eco
Image
The wise man does not discriminate he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
Umberto Eco
Image
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.
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 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
I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays
Umberto Eco
Image
I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
Umberto Eco
Image
We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
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
There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
Umberto Eco
Image
I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
Umberto Eco
Image
I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.
Umberto Eco
Image
The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
Umberto Eco