Umberto Eco Quotes

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever. It is to create something that will.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

I hope that I'll keep being creative until they throw dirt on me.

The most important thing you do in your life is to die.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Death doesn't frighten me, it bothers me. It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow but me I am no longer there. What bothers me is no longer being alive, not being dead.

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

At my age flowers scare me.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

Life and death are important. Don't suffer them in vain.

Life is an incurable disease.

Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?