Umberto Eco

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”

“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”

“Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.”

“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.”

“Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe—with charity—that there is still room for Hope.”

“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.”

“Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.”

“I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.”

“Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.”

“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.”

“If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.”

“Atât de mare e puterea adevărului care, precum binele, se răspândește de la sine.”

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

“It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.”

“The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?”

“I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.”

“I felt like poisoning a monk.”

“If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.”

“Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.”

“Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”