Umberto Eco Quotes

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Everything on earth is a game. A passing thing. We all end up dead. We all end up the same, don't we?

When pop can no longer muster a nihilation of the World, a nihilation of the Possible, then it will only be the ghosts that are worthy of our time.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Life and death are nothing but the mind. Years, months, days, and hours are nothing but the mind. Dreams, illusions, and mirages are nothing but the mind. The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

Death is nothing, nor life either, for that matter. To die, to sleep, to pass into nothingness, what does it matter? Everything is an illusion.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

What seems real to the mind can be as important as any material fact. We live by the spirit and the imagination as well as by our senses. Cartoon animation can give fantasy the same reality as those things we can touch and see and hear.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Mind is nothing but dreams and dreams - dreams of the past, dreams of the future, dreams of how things should be, dreams of great ambitions, achievements. Dreams and desires, that is the stuff mind is made of. But it surrounds you like a China Wall. And because of it the fish remains unaware of the ocean.

There is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

As far as our physical form, the mind is a great temple. But it has a life span and it dies.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

What you picture in your mind, your mind will go to work to accomplish. When you change your pictures you automatically change your performance