Another my favorite is Umberto Eco – an Italian novelist and philosopher, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and certainly one of the most interest authors of the twentieth century. His Foucault’s Pendulum (1989) is one of my my most loved books.
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. ”
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed. ”
“Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.”
“You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.”
“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.”
“Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I can conceive Him as being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”(56)”
“What did I really think fifteen years ago? As a nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can’t hurt, and you might get better.”
“And I began to question everything around me: the houses, the shop signs, the clouds in the sky, and the engravings in the library, asking them to tell me not their superficial story but another, deeper story, which they surely were hiding–but finally would reveal thanks to the principle of mystic resemblances.”
“The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that’s why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it’s hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus.”
“ever since the days of Aristotle, we have been trying to define things based on their essence. The definition of man? An animal that acts in a deliberate way. Now, it took naturalists 80 years to come up with a definition of a platypus. They found it endlessly difficult to describe the essence of this animal. It lives underwater and on land; it lays eggs, and yet it’s a mammal. So what did that definition look like? It was a list, a list of characteristics.”
“…these are now people lost in a maze: some choose one path, some another; some shout for help, and there’s no telling if the replies they hear are other [lost] voices or the echo of their own…”
“Taken literally, these texts were a pile of absurdities, riddles, contradictions.”
“I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph.”
“‘Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies.’
‘Great,’ Belbo said admiringly. ‘I have one, too: Aztec Equitation.’
‘Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Anynata?’
‘We’ll have to see.’ Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. ‘Potio-section…’ He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. ‘Potio-section, as everybody knows, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,’ he said to Diotallevi……”
“But now 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.
“If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better to go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): “Here I am, the One, and they don’t know it.” If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize and move on, even though you’re God and with a snap of your fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.”
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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.
Translation is the art of failure.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
Great Quotes Every Day 