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You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

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
Cannot
Multiple
Revelations
Escape
Illusion
Infinite
Fleeing
Taking
Identical
Told
Revelation
Another
Refuge

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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.
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He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
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A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
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But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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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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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.
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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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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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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.
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National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
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I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
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I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
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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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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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