“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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, quote from The Name of the Rose
“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“ كان رجال العهود الغابرة وسيمي الطلعة طويلي القامة و الآن أصبحوا أطفالاً و أقزاماً وليس هذا إلا دليلاً من جملة أدلة أخرى كثيرة تشهد بتعاسة عالم يسير نحو الهرم”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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, quote from The Name of the Rose
“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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, quote from The Name of the Rose
“How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less
I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and
as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,
without asking too many questions.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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, quote from The Name of the Rose
“This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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, quote from The Name of the Rose
“We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
“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, quote from The Name of the Rose
“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
Born place: in Alessandria, Italy
Born date January 5, 1932
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“Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.
Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Centennial
“I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred. Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
“Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Sword of Shannara
“I smoothed Colton’s blanket across his chest and tucked him in snug the
way he liked—and for the first time since he started talking about heaven, I
intentionally tried to trip him up. “I remember you saying you stayed with
Pop,” I said. “So when it got dark and you went home with Pop, what did
you two do?”
Suddenly serious, Colton scowled at me. “It doesn’t get dark in heaven,
Dad! Who told you that?”
I held my ground. “What do you mean it doesn’t get dark?”
“God and Jesus light up heaven. It never gets dark. It’s always bright.”
The joke was on me. Not only had Colton not fallen for the “when it gets
dark in heaven” trick, but he could tell me why it didn’t get dark: “The city
does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives
it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”
― Todd Burpo, quote from Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back
“And Caroline? Speaking fo thin walls?" he said, as he opened his door and looked back at me. He leaned in his own doorway, thumping his fist on the wall.
"Yes?" I asked a little too dreamily for my own good.
His smirk reappeared and he said, "Sweet dreams".
He thumped the wall one more time, winked, and went inside.
Huh. Sweet dreams and thin walls. Sweet dreams and thin walls...
Mother of pearl. He'd heard me...”
― Alice Clayton, quote from Wallbanger
The Quillan Games
Executive Orders
Kushiel's Justice
Rainbow Valley
Secrets of Jewish We...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
