Quote

Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.

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
Sense
Societies
Obscure
Contemporary
Cooking
Drive
Kept
Food
Feast
Lost
Culinary

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
Umberto Eco
Image
A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
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
Image
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
Umberto Eco
Image
Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.
Umberto Eco
Image
For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.
Umberto Eco
Image
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
Umberto Eco
Image
All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
Umberto Eco
Image
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Umberto Eco
Image
What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
Umberto Eco
Image
There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
Umberto Eco
Image
We like lists because we don't want to die.
Umberto Eco
Image
Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.
Umberto Eco
Image
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
Umberto Eco
Image
The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
Umberto Eco
Image
Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
Umberto Eco
Image
Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!
Umberto Eco
Image
Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats.
Umberto Eco
Image
The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.
Umberto Eco
Image
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.
Umberto Eco