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b83302a
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I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?"
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divine-will
omnipotence
chaos
theology
creation
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Umberto Eco |
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af31952
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
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weakness
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Umberto Eco |
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21ebc44
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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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religion
nationalism
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Umberto Eco |
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361afe6
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the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.
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death
religion
life
irreligion
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Umberto Eco |
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c3e2357
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I felt like poisoning a monk.
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writing
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Umberto Eco |
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007bcdf
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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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writing
teaching
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Umberto Eco |
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c8e853a
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American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes, served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup contain..
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umberto-eco
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Umberto Eco |
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e2634df
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The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
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Umberto Eco |
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a8e6243
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The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
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Umberto Eco |
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921c682
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Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Uberti..
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truth
torture
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Umberto Eco |
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f8e75d1
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It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the c..
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Umberto Eco |
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ba547e7
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This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
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Umberto Eco |
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d72bf29
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Beauty is, in some ways, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages, nevertheless a beautiful object must always follow certain rules ... Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibilities. Beauty is finite. Ugliness is infinite, like God.
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Umberto Eco |
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bba1c08
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Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all."
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truth
semiotics
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Umberto Eco |
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c975250
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Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.
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Umberto Eco |
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17b6e2d
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I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
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Umberto Eco |
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7237662
|
Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height."
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profound
thought-provoking
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Umberto Eco |
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e6a5e79
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You'll come back To me . . . It's written in the stars, you see, you'll come back. You'll come back, it's a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
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Umberto Eco |
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f1f9f71
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There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.
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Umberto Eco |
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a3263ca
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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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seduction
curiosity
knowledge
vice
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Umberto Eco |
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527104c
|
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else's house.
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Umberto Eco |
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27be637
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Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.
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Umberto Eco |
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0e81357
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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
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Umberto Eco |
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43e891a
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We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting i..
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books
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Umberto Eco |
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79306f0
|
In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make ma..
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religion
prophets
fanaticism
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Umberto Eco |
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b4dc59a
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I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.
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Umberto Eco |
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009ceb5
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You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don't love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends ... But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms ..
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Umberto Eco |
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8479c00
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The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
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variety
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Umberto Eco |
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b98399d
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But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong."
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heresy
orthodoxy
power
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Umberto Eco |
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84a93f6
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I should be at peace. I have understood. Don't some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and truimph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where th..
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Umberto Eco |
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916b03a
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You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
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wisdom-inspirational
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Umberto Eco |
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6272861
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a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.
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librarians
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Umberto Eco |
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707c021
|
I returned to the courtyard and saw that the sun had grown weaker. Beautiful and clear as it had been, the morning (as the day approached the completion of its first half) was becoming damp and misty. Heavy clouds moved from the north and were invading the top of the mountain, covering it with a light brume. It seemed to be fog, and perhaps fog was also rising from the ground, but at that altitude it was difficult to distinguish the mists t..
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seeing
mist
morning
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Umberto Eco |
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dbabc68
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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.
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television
mass-media
symbols
images
reflection
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Umberto Eco |
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86472dd
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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
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writing
reasons
craft
why
readers
writers
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Umberto Eco |
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873c0b7
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Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.
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truth
games
knowledge
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Umberto Eco |
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bb44770
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Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.
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Umberto Eco |
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741b177
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Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-S..
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Umberto Eco |
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3427d69
|
I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole in the top, also, the water spurts out below." "Isn't that obvious?" I said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water down." "A typical scientific explanation, in whi..
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Umberto Eco |
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9d8e2de
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What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.
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Umberto Eco |
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11861b6
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l '`rf shyy' lys hnk shyy' '`lmh .w nm b`D l'shy yHsh lmr bqlbh , 'trk qlbk ytklm ,s'l lwjwh w l tstm` l~ l'lsn
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Umberto Eco |
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8bac74c
|
Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?"
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stereotypes
writing
originality
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Umberto Eco |
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9559682
|
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.
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lists
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Umberto Eco |
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6e3cef5
|
INTERVIEWER Do you believe in God? ECO Why does one love a certain person one day and discover the next day that the love is gone? Feelings, alas, disappear without justification, and often without a trace. INTERVIEWER If you don't believe in God, then why have you written at such great length about religion?
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Umberto Eco |