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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.

— Umberto Eco Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

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More quotes by Umberto Eco

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Umberto Eco (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.