1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco photo

Umberto Eco Quotes

Total quotes: 6
“How peaceful life would be without love. How safe. How tranquil. And how very dull.”
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Tagged: Love, Living, Life
“For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.”
— Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Tagged: Enemy, recognizing an enemy, fearing an enemy, close enemy, enemies
“Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Tagged: Tired, Sleep, sins
“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.”
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Tagged: I Love You Dad, Fatherhood, Family, Childhood, Wisdom, Growing Up
“Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.”
— Umberto Eco
Tagged: Aesthetic, beauty, ugliness
“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.”
— Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197: An Interview by Lila Azam Zanganeh
Tagged: Intellect, Creativity, Knowledge, Production
loading next page...