Quotes by Umberto Eco

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

— Umberto Eco

Truth

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

— Umberto Eco

Courage

But now 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.

— Umberto Eco

Truth

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

— Umberto Eco

Courage

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

— Umberto Eco

Success

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

— Umberto Eco

Love

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

Translation is the art of failure.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

— Umberto Eco

Happiness

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

— Umberto Eco

Freedom

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

— Umberto Eco

Life

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

— Umberto Eco

Education

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

— Umberto Eco

Wisdom