Eco to the Rescue: “A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie”

When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.
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.
By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
Translation is the art of failure.
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
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.
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.
Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
Lying about the future produces history.
What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
Time is an eternity that stammers.
Yes, I know, it’s not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Et en Français:
Il y a quatre types idéals : le crétin, l’imbécile, le stupide et le fou. Le normal, c’est le mélange équilibré des quatre.
Chaque écrivain raconte toujours une même obsession.
Le prix à payer pour avoir Einstein d’un côté, c’est d’avoir un imbécile de l’autre côté
L’important ce n’est pas tellement d’avoir des souvenirs, c’est toujours de régler ses comptes avec eux.
L’écrivain essaie d’échapper aux interprétations, non pas nécessairement parce qu’il n’y en a pas, mais parce qu’il y en a peut-être plusieurs et qu’il ne veut pas arrêter les lecteurs sur une seule.
La télévision rend intelligent les gens qui n’ont pas accès à la culture et abrutit ceux qui se croient cultivés.
Si Dieu existait, il serait une bibliothèque.
Laisse parler ton coeur, interroge les visages,n’écoute pas les langues…