Quotes by Semioticians

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
Umberto Eco
The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information.
Umberto Eco
A conversation between Adso and William -You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.""And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don't know know why you know that you know what you do?"I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. "Perhaps that's it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.
Umberto Eco
It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.
Umberto Eco
And in that moment I experience a revelation.I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: "God does not exist.
Umberto Eco
So, Colonna, please demonstrate to our friends how it's possible to respect, or appear to respect, one fundamental principle of democratic journalism, which is separating fact from opinion. ...''Simple,' I said. 'Take the major British or American newspapers. If they report, say, a fire or a car accident, then obviously they can't indulge in saying what they think. And so they introduce into the piece, in quotation marks, the statements of a witness, a man in the street, someone who represents public opinion. Those statements, once put in quotes, become facts - in other words, it's a fact that that person expressed that opinion. But it might be assumed that the journalist has only quoted someone who thinks like him. So there will be two conflicting statements to show, as a fact, that there are varying opinions on a particular issue, and the newspaper is taking account of this irrefutable fact. The trick lies in quoting first a trivial opinion and then another opinion that is more respectable, and more closely reflects the journalist's view. In this way, readers are under the impression that they are being informed about two facts, but they're persuaded to accept just one view as being more convincing.
Umberto Eco
But chance has a taste for conspiracy.
Umberto Eco
The excluded when on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true leper are only the illustration ordained by god to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying “lepers” we would understand “outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities” but we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the words of Christ, would condemn the behaviour of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful have always realised this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded a reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers.
Umberto Eco
The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
Umberto Eco
The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.
Umberto Eco
Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened."Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Umberto Eco
It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Umberto Eco
I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.
Umberto Eco
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.
Umberto Eco
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
William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound.
Umberto Eco
After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?
Umberto Eco
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
Umberto Eco
Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...
Umberto Eco
Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously.
Umberto Eco
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.
Umberto Eco
... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
Umberto Eco
To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido.
Umberto Eco
The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.
Umberto Eco
The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.
Umberto Eco
The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.
Umberto Eco
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
Umberto Eco
The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.
Umberto Eco
Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.
Umberto Eco
the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved
Umberto Eco
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries -old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco
The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer,the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoonthat is better than a spoon
Umberto Eco
And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
Umberto Eco
But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.
Umberto Eco
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?
Umberto Eco
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?
Umberto Eco
He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.
Umberto Eco
We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.
Umberto Eco
What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?
Umberto Eco
The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came.
Umberto Eco
But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit.
Umberto Eco
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco
For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.
Umberto Eco
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
Umberto Eco
The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.
Umberto Eco
We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
Umberto Eco
He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.
Umberto Eco
Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret.
Umberto Eco
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
Umberto Eco
There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ‘to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.
Umberto Eco
Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I studied histories of words, to understand what was happening in my body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that the linguistic term `metathesis' is similar to the oncological term `metastasis'? What is the metathesis? Instead of `clasp' one says `claps.' Instead of `beloved' one says `bevoled.' It's the temurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means the transposition or interchange, while metastasis indicates the change and shifting. How stupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it's the verb metatithemi or the verb methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose, I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a meaning. And methistemi? It's the same thing: I move, I transform, I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That's why I'm dying, Jacopo, and you know it.
Umberto Eco
Translation is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco
But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?
Umberto Eco
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
Umberto Eco
Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
Umberto Eco
Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it.
Umberto Eco
I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
Umberto Eco
Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco