Umberto Eco Quotes

Everything does go in a circle.

The more things change, the more they are the same.

Everything is a version of something else.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

It was as familiar to me as a song I'd been hearing my whole life, covered by various people but the basic tune the same.

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.

I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe. We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

He also knows that certain moments repeat themselves.

It is natural to men to judge of things less known, by some similitude they observe, or think they observe, between them and things more familiar or better known. In many cases, we have no better way of judging. And, where the things compared have really a great similitude in their nature, when there is reason to think that they are subject to the same laws, there may be a considerable degree of probability in conclusions drawn from analogy.

A pilot's business is with the wind, and with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of the dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.

Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.

Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.

When I see nature, when I look into the sky, the dawn, the sun, the colors of insects, snow crystals, the night stars, I don't feel a need for God. Perhaps when I can no longer look and wonder, when I believe in nothing - then, perhaps, I might need something else. But I don't know what.

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

Back of my forehead I feel tonight A whole sky full of stars. Under a western moon. Life is indeed lovely!

The sky is no longer the limit.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Every dew-drop and rain-drop had a whole heaven within it.

A miracle constantly repeated becomes a process of nature.

Change but the name, and you are the subject of the story.

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.

Your way begins at the other side. Become the sky.