More Quotes by Umberto Eco
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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.
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
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?
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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.
Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
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.
