Umberto Eco Quotes

We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.

Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them.

I always thought George Bush was more oblivious than mean, but oblivious can quickly go to mean.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.

I think people tend to be very myopic and they don't understand how their actions impact others.

Ignorance is the mother of admiration.

A feel-good style can be a symptom of unawareness or lack of caring.

It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.

It's probably an intellectual weakness, but I look at the stars, and I say, 'There's something bigger than us out there.'

The good thing about people who are corporate is that they're stupid. So they can be touching something that's precious or radical or special, and they miss the point completely.

Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.

Nothing annoys me more than uninformed people not considering the effects of what they say.

I want to be constantly in awe of the possibilities of the universe.

It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

What inspires me is the universe.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

God is a synergetic experience. Science can never reveal it, philosophy can never come to it - only a poetic approach, a very passive, very loving approach, can.

Ignorance and confidence are constant companions

The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.