Umberto Eco
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"Umberto Eco", Order of Merit of the Italian Republic/OMRI is an Italian Semiotics/semiotician, essayist, philosopher, Literary criticism/literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, bible/biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written further novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His most recent novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.

Eco has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. He is founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione (Department of Media Studies) at the University of the Republic of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici (Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities), University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010), and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous novelists! More Umberto Eco on Wikipedia.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

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.

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

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

Translation is the art of failure.

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.

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.