Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was an Italian literary critic, philosopher, medievalist, novelist, and semiotician (a student of signs and symbols.) He is best known for his first novel, Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose,) a whodunit set in an isolated 14th-century Italian monastery.
Born in Alessandria in Italy’s Piedmont region, Eco studied medieval aesthetics and philosophy at Turin and wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Aquinas. He taught at Turin 1956–67. Then he became a professor at Bologna and taught semiotics and literary theory. By 1978, Eco was a well-known scholar and had authored books like The Open Work (1962,) Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (1973,) and A Theory of Semiotics (1976.)
Eco wrote the erudite philosophical thriller Il nome della rosa in the vein of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. As a philosophical novel, Il nome della rosa included biblical references, discussions of Christian theology and heresies, and a medieval setting. The book became a worldwide bestseller and a 1986 movie starring Sean Connery by director Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Eco’s other works are The Island of the Day Before (1994) and The Prague Cemetery (2011.) His novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) took eight years to write and was encompassed references to Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theory. He also wrote children’s books and literary criticism.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Umberto Eco
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Life
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Bravery, Courage
There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.
—Umberto Eco
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
—Umberto Eco
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us.
—Umberto Eco
Solitude is a kind of freedom.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Solitude
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Poets, Poetry
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Dreams
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
—Umberto Eco
There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries….
—Umberto Eco
The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell—in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Love
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Reading, Books
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.
—Umberto Eco
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.
—Umberto Eco
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