Umberto Eco Quotes

The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information.

~ Umberto Eco

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.

~ Umberto Eco

Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.

~ Umberto Eco

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

~ Umberto Eco

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

~ Umberto Eco

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

Our life is full of empty space.

~ Umberto Eco

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

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

~ Umberto Eco

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

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

~ Umberto Eco

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

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

~ Umberto Eco

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

~ Umberto Eco

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

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

~ Umberto Eco

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

~ Umberto Eco