Umberto Eco

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“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...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“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.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“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, Foucault's Pendulum

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”
― Umberto Eco

“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

“Then why do you want to know?"

"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”
― Umberto Eco

“What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose