More Quotes by Umberto Eco
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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.
The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
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.
The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
