#Quote
More Quotes by Umberto Eco
Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
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.
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.
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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.
