Umberto Eco

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else"
— Umberto Eco

"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 (The Name of the Rose)

"We live for books." — Umberto Eco

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

"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."
— Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco
"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

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