It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers. Umberto Eco More Quotes by Umberto Eco More Quotes From Umberto Eco For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time. Umberto Eco criticism long years The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick. Umberto Eco sick would-be memories Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart! Umberto Eco taught oxford heart Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow. Umberto Eco cases opposites believe The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Umberto Eco ladders mind order You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus. Umberto Eco falling-in-love love-you love-is I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul. Umberto Eco soul memories believe I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die. Umberto Eco gun writing running If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them. Umberto Eco territory century done How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon. Umberto Eco dungeons darkness looks Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names. Umberto Eco names yesterday rose The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed. Umberto Eco light eye heart 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. Umberto Eco humility temptation book 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. Umberto Eco discipline order lying I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing. Umberto Eco differences believe thinking But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong. Umberto Eco rome strong people After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? Umberto Eco passion light fire Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy? Umberto Eco feelings morning beautiful I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist? Umberto Eco omnipotence differences choices Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know. Umberto Eco what-matters listening mean
