Umberto Eco’s Intellectual Legacy In 13 Sentences

The great Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has left us. With distinguished thinking and style, this marvelous mind leaves a great emotional and intellectual legacy both for his contemporary followers and for those who will merge with his thought in the future.

It is a consolation to have been able to enjoy such wonderful creations as “The name of the rose”, “Foucault’s pendulum”, “Number zero” or “The Prague cemetery” . It was the first of those cited, published in 1980, which first earned him popularity. A masterpiece that narrated the history, legends and intrigues of the Italian Middle Ages with a great mystery.

Critical of modern life, social networks, culture and journalism, his passion for writing and promoting critical thinking deserved that today he is considered one of the brightest minds in Europe of the last century.

Some phrases from Umberto Eco

His life trajectory, full of successes and recognition, has left us great thoughts to reflect on and remember him. For this reason, we believe that a good tribute is a review of some of his most famous quotes. Here are some of them:

• “Social media gives legions of idiots who used to speak only at the bar after a glass of wine the right to speak, without harming the community. They were then quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It is the invasion of the imbeciles ” . Echo to the newspaper La Stampa.

• “The world is full of beautiful books that nobody reads.”
• “Books are not made to be believed, but to be investigated. When we consider a book, we should not ask ourselves what it says, but what it means. ”  The name of the rose.
• ” What is philosophy? I’m sorry for my trivial conservatism, but I can’t find a better answer than Aristotle’s definition of Metaphysics: a response to an act of wonder. “
• “When men stop believing in God, it does not mean that they believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

• “Wisdom is not destroying idols, but never creating them.”
• “Love is wiser than wisdom”
• “Nothing is more harmful to creativity than the fury of inspiration.”

• “The true hero is a hero by mistake. He dreams of being an honest coward like everyone else ”.
• “The monsters exist because they are part of a divine plan and in the horrible characteristics of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.”  The name of the rose.
• “ All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish it, good poets burn it ”.
• “It is not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news and knowing how to put together four different news items means proposing to the reader a fifth story.”  Number zero.
• “Today, when the names of corrupt or fraudsters emerge and more is known, people do not care about anything and only Albanian chicken thieves go to jail.” Echo to the Efe Agency.

The name of the rose, from literary bestseller to film success

It was his fiction novel “The Name of the Rose” that managed to launch Umberto Eco to absolute literary stardom. In fact, the repercussion of its bestseller was such that Jean-Jacques Annaud and a group of Italian-Franco-German production companies set out to bring to the big screen the adventures of the Franciscan detective Guillermo de Baskerville, played by Sean Connery.

Whoever likes history will like this wonderful novel and its filmographic adaptation. Here is a fragment of the film to get you started: