More Quotes by Umberto Eco
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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.
Love is wiser than wisdom.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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.
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.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
