#Quote
More Quotes by Umberto Eco
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.
The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
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.
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.
