59 quotes
There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
In this world you either read or write, and writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)
The language of Europe is translation.
I am mimetic. If I write a book set in the seventeenth century, I write in a Baroque style. If I’m writing a book set in a newspaper office, I write in Journalese.
The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
"That man is … odd," I dared say to William.
"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."
The Name of the Rose (1980)
I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
A philosophy does not play its role as an actor during a recital; it interacts with other philosophies and with other facts, and it cannot know the results of the interaction between itself and other world visions.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
The Name of the Rose (1980)
Semiosis is, according to Peirce, "an action, or influence, which is, or involves, an operation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into an action between pairs".
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
As subjects, we are what the shape of the world produced by signs makes us become.
Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis. And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
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.
The Name of the Rose (1980)
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994)
A sign is not only something which stands for something else; it is also something that can and must be interpreted. The criterion of interpretability allows us to start from a given sign to cover, step by step, the whole universe of semiosis.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
"The Poet had, who had made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves — which, as Niketas remarked with a smile — was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.
Baudolino (2000)
The basic principle [of hermetic drift semiotics] is not only that the similar can be known through the similar but also that from similarity to similarity everything can be connected with everything else, so that everything can be in turn either the expression or the content of any other thing.
U. Eco (1990)