Umberto Eco Quotes

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

The idea is more important than the object.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

The description is not the described.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

When you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the chair in your mind did not burn or disappear

Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

A map is the dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn baby of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.

Truth happens to an idea

The map appears to us more real than the land.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

The body, then, has a mind of its own. It must follow, then, that the Mind has a body of its own, even if it’s like nothing that we can see around us, or have ever seen.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal.

Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.