Quotes By Umberto Eco

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

Translation is the art of failure.

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.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.