Quotebunny has 11 quotations by Umberto Eco.
“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”
“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”
“But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
“Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
“The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.”
“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.”
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
“There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.”
“Translation is the art of failure.”

Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. Eco is President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He was voted 14th in 2008.