Umberto Eco

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Be passionate about something and lean to that strength.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

I teach that all men are mad.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.