The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?
("The Name of the Rose")
More Quotes from Umberto Eco:
And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.Umberto Eco
The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.
Umberto Eco
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
Umberto Eco
The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
Umberto Eco
'I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs.... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.' 'But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something....' 'What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.... The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.'
Umberto Eco
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
Umberto Eco
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Based on Topics: Age Quotes, Body Quotes, Error & Mistake Quotes, Faces Quotes, Facts Quotes, Vice & Virtue QuotesBased on Keywords: beardless, monkish, noonday
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