“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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“The best way to get a handle on the subject would be to ask the experts, but one does not simply walk into a church or synagogue and ask to speak with a demonologist. There are not that many of them; their names are confidential, and they are obliged to report their experiences only to their superiors. Even Ed Warren will not tell all about these horrendous black spirits that come in the night bearing messages and proclamations of blasphemy. When pressed on the matter, in fact, Ed’s reply is: “There are things known to priests and myself that are best left unsaid.” Upon what, then, does Ed Warren base his opinions? Is there proper evidence or corroboration to substantiate his claims? “People who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon sometimes ask me if I’m not involved in a sort of ultrarealistic hallucination, like Don Quixote jousting with windmills. Well, hallucinations are visionary experiences. This, on the other hand, is a phenomenon that hits back. My knowledge of the subject is no different than that of learned clergymen, and they’ll tell you as plainly as I will that this isn’t something to be easily checked off as a bad dream. “I can support everything I say with bona fide evidence,” Ed goes on, “and testimony by credible witnesses and blue-ribbon professionals. There is no conjecture involved here. My statements about the nature of the demonic spirit are based on my own firsthand experiences over thirty years in this work, backed up by the experiences of other recognized demonologists, plus the experiences of the exorcist clergy, plus the testimony of hundreds of witnesses who’ve been these spirits’ victims, plus the full weight of hard physical evidence. Theological dogma about the demonic simply proves consistent with my own findings about these spirits in real life. But let me be more specific. “The inhuman spirit often identifies itself as the devil and then—through physical or psychological means—proves itself to be just that. Again speaking from my own personal experiences, I have been burned by these invisible forces of pandemonium. I have been slashed and cut; these spirits have gouged marks and symbols on my body. I’ve been thrown around the room like a toy. My arms have been twisted up behind me until they’ve ached for a week. I’ve incurred sudden illnesses to knock me out of an investigation. Physicalized monstrosities have manifested before me, threatening death,”
― quote from The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren
“He whose heart is full of tenderness, and truth; Who loves mankind more than he loves himself, And cannot find room in his heart to hate, May be another Christ. We all may be The Saviours of the world, if we believe In the Divinity which dwells in us And worship it, and nail our grosser selves, Our tempers, greeds, and our unworthy aims, Upon the cross. Who giveth love to all, Pays kindness for unkindness, smiles for frowns, Lends new courage to each fainting heart, And strengthens hope and scatters joy abroad, He, too, is a Redeemer, Son of God. Ella Wheeler Wilcox5”
― quote from Discover the Power Within You
“At the software-architecture level, the complexity of a problem is reduced by dividing the system into subsystems. Humans have an easier time comprehending several simple pieces of information than one complicated piece.”
― quote from Code Complete
“Great souls suffer in silence. JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER During”
― quote from Thank You for Being Such a Pain: Spiritual Guidance for Dealing with Difficult People
“That witch... It was her. She took the diary. It has to be. I'm going to kill her... Penny. - Ivy”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
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The AnalystBookQuoters 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.
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