Today I realize that many recent exercises in "deconstructive reading" read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.

Umberto Eco

Categorized in : Exercise Reading Inspiration

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

atheist men believe

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

Umberto Eco

mad four stupid

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

Umberto Eco

idiot things-change ifs

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

Umberto Eco

crazy problem giving

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

Umberto Eco

inspirational love relationship

All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.

Umberto Eco

fake loss people

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

fathers-day dad believe

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots.

Umberto Eco

glasses writing two

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.

Umberto Eco

creativity creative wise

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

Umberto Eco

escaping want way

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Umberto Eco

language matter feelings

To survive, you must tell stories.

Umberto Eco

story-writers stories

Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault's Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.

Umberto Eco

knights secret character

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.

Umberto Eco

army communication country

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

Umberto Eco

tests spirit heart

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

Umberto Eco

good-morning smell book

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Umberto Eco

scrap littles

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

heart love men

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.

Umberto Eco

assuming intelligent book

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, "How are you, you old scoundrel!" clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

Umberto Eco

serious sometimes mean