Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.
— Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician and novelist who taught for much of his life at the University of Bologna. English readers know him best for The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery that folds semiotics, medieval studies and literary theory into a detective story, and for Foucault's Pendulum (1988), a novel about the history of occultism.
He wrote constantly, from children's books and translations to a twice-monthly newspaper column he kept up for three decades. His 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", which lists fourteen features he believed fascist movements share, has drawn new attention in this century.
He wrote constantly, from children's books and translations to a twice-monthly newspaper column he kept up for three decades. His 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", which lists fourteen features he believed fascist movements share, has drawn new attention in this century.
Most quoted works
- The Name of the Rose 38
- Foucault's Pendulum 16
- Postscript to the Name of the Rose 15
- The Island of the Day Before 5
- How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays 4
- Numero zero 3
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
— Foucault's Pendulum
I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.
— Numero zero
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
— Postscript to the Name of the Rose
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
— The Island of the Day Before
I felt like poisoning a monk.
— Postscript to the Name of the Rose
In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
— Postscript to the Name of the Rose
Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?
— Postscript to the Name of the Rose
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
— The Prague Cemetery
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
— The Name of the Rose
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.
— The Prague Cemetery
Then why do you want to know?""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
Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe—with charity—that there is still room for Hope.
— Belief or Nonbelief?
To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.
— How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays
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?
— Postscript to the Name of the Rose
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.
— Foucault's Pendulum