Umberto Eco Quotes

Being that can be understood is language.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

It was strange how you could never form any conclusion from what women said. It was not that they did not know what they were talking about, but you never drew the right conclusions.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

Translation is the art of failure.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.