Umberto Eco - Quodid

About

Picture of Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on the history of occultism and its contemporary interpretation through the new age movement.

Quotes from Umberto Eco

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Our heroes are people and people are flawed. Don't let that taint the thing you love.

But the important thing is not the finding. It is the seeking. It is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.