Umberto Eco Quotes

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

For after years of living in a cage, a lion no longer even believes it is a lion . . . and a man no longer believes he is a man.

Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?

How strange it is to be anything at all.

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?

The actuality of thought is life.

And since the now is all there ever is in your life, your entire life unfolds as the present moment. People don't realize it, but all they ever have is "this". This moment.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

If I think, I am lost.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

I was stuck in the feeling that one did not--was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part and does not believe in the play.

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?

I think that most art is asking a question or is looking for something, looking for answers and that is what life seems to be about for most people.

Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.