I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

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

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

Then why do you want to know?" "Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.

Fear prophets, Adso, 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.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”" -

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.

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.

Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

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.

How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.

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.

This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.