Umberto Eco Quotes

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

A long time ago, Descartes sad, “I think, therefore I am.” But if you are not thinking, what?

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

To understand our own thinking is to understand all thinking.

I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

The voice inside your head is not the voice of god. It just sounds like it thinks it is.

No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

It's fun to be almost grown up in some ways, but it's not the kind of fun I expected, Marilla. There's so much to learn and do and think that there isn't time for big words.

I tell, therefore you are.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

Maybe I'm seeing myself in a different way than the people in the audience see me, 'cause to me, I think I look like a ballerina and I feel like a ballerina. But maybe I'm not seeing what other people are seeing.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

Eating more consciously now feels like a way of being. I actually think about how my food got to my plate.

I'm not always what I think I am, but I am what I think.

Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality.

Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.

I think we can all recognize in some way or another that we as a human species, have been granted an incredible gift of intentionality and of consciousness. Perhaps this gift is a hint to how we should conduct our lives.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

I am me, whatever that means. I am conscious.