01c. 1974 ADthe book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improvedUmberto Eco / quote ↗
02c. 1974 ADThroughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
03c. 1974 ADThe people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
04c. 1974 ADDaytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
05c. 1974 ADThe great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
06c. 1974 ADThe outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
07c. 1974 ADThe print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
08c. 1974 ADTo emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
09c. 1974 AD... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
10c. 1974 ADThe list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
11c. 1974 ADColorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
12c. 1974 ADUsually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...Umberto Eco / quote ↗
13c. 1974 ADIt is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
14c. 1974 ADAfter all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?Umberto Eco / quote ↗
15c. 1974 ADWilliam made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
16c. 1974 ADI 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1974 ADA 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.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
18c. 1974 ADI was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
19c. 1974 ADIt [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
20c. 1974 ADThen 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.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
21c. 1974 ADThe visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
22c. 1974 ADThe Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
23c. 1974 ADThe excluded when on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true leper are only the illustration ordained by god to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying “lepers” we would understand “outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities” but we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the words of Christ, would condemn the behaviour of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful have always realised this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded a reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers.Umberto Eco / quote ↗
