The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.


Umberto Eco

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You should read the novel in order to live, to feel, to tell someone the hidden secret of it.
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The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
UMBERTO ECO
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm wha...
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I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm d...
UMBERTO ECO
In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is...
UMBERTO ECO
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel un...
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I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that...
UMBERTO ECO
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembe...
UMBERTO ECO
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
UMBERTO ECO
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respira...
UMBERTO ECO
But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes ...
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[...] there is one inexorable law of technology, and it is this: when revolutionary inventions becom...
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
UMBERTO ECO
إنّ الهواتفَ الجوَّالة لا يمكنها أن تدوم ، أوّلًا ، لأن...
UMBERTO ECO
حتىٰ الآن لا تصلح الهواتف الجوَّالة إلَّا للأزواج الخا...
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But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Chris...
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L'essere umano è davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato città, scritt...
UMBERTO ECO
To survive, you must tell stories.
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn...
UMBERTO ECO
Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tact...
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Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty part...
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The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer,
the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improve...
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The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more ev...
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The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.
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Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep...
UMBERTO ECO
For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded ...
UMBERTO ECO
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are th...
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I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our ba...
UMBERTO ECO
And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most lovi...
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All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are...
UMBERTO ECO
But why do some people support [the heretics]?"
"Because it serves their purposes, which conce...
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In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a...
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There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I...
UMBERTO ECO
But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of tho...
UMBERTO ECO
لا أعرف شيئا ليس هناك شيئ أعلمه .و إنما بعض الأشياء يحسه...
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...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy...
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We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could l...
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This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the...
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How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!
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Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
UMBERTO ECO
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a nove...
UMBERTO ECO
كان رجال العهود الغابرة وسيمي الطلعة طويلي القامة و �...
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True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in...
UMBERTO ECO
Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same ...
UMBERTO ECO
We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
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Love is wiser than wisdom.
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Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now...
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Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in ev...
UMBERTO ECO
the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most ...
UMBERTO ECO
American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100
degrees centigrade in pla...
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The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of d...
UMBERTO ECO
Priešas turi būti atpažįstamas ir baisus, jis turi būti tavo namuose arba prie durų slenksčio...
UMBERTO ECO