Skip to content

Umberto Eco Quotes

1932–2016 Italy

Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, essayist, literary critic, and novelist, most famous for his novel The Name of the Rose (1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.

Italy
Academics
Essayists
Novelists
Philosophers

Also known as: Eco, Eco, Umberto, Baudolino

Random Umberto Eco quote

59 quotes

A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.

Ur-Fascism (1995)

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.

Indeterminacy, complementarity, noncausality are not modes of being in the physical world, but systems for describing it in a convenient way.

The Role of the Reader : Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979)

One should not have the arrogance to declare that God does not exist.

No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer's precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

When semiotics posits such concepts as 'sign', it does not act like a science; it acts like philosophy when it posits such abstractions as subject, good and evil, truth or revolution.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.

Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (1998)

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.

Trattato di semiotica generale (1975)

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed.

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...

The Name of the Rose (1980)

A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

These systems can be studied from a syntactic, a semantic, or a pragmatic point of view.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

The sign is a gesture produced with the intention of communicating, that is, in order to transmit one's representation or inner state to another being.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.

The Name of the Rose (1980)

Not every specific semiotics can claim to be like a natural science. In fact, every specific semiotics is at most a human science, and everybody knows how controversial such a notion still is.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

Every specific semiotics (as every science) is concerned with general epistemological problems.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.

Ur-Fascism (1995)

In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.

Preface to the American edition of Travels in Hyperreality (1986)

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

The Name of the Rose (1980)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Umberto Eco (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.