More Quotes by Umberto Eco
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
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.
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
