Umberto Eco II

We live for books.

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

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.

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.

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

Love is wiser than wisdom.

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.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

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