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 comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Humor
Solitude is a kind of freedom.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Solitude
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Blame
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: Books, Reading
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
Topics: Prophecy
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
Topics: Storytelling
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
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: Poetry, Poets
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
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
Topics: America
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Dreams
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.
—Umberto Eco
Topics: Courage, Bravery
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
Topics: Father
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
Hans-Georg Gadamer German Philosopher
Jose Ortega y. Gasset Spanish Philosopher
Marshall Mcluhan Canadian Thinker
John Rawls American Philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher German Theologian
Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach German Philosopher
Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist