More Quotes by Umberto Eco
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.
Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.
To survive, you must tell stories.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
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.
All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
Love is wiser than wisdom.
