In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in fla...
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between Go...
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has m...
The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.
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 dev...
The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that t...
Do not laugh too much at your fellows. Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secul...
Our life is full of empty space.
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and t...
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in...
Here's a book about gnomes, undines, salamanders, elves, sylphs, fairies, but it, too, brings in the origins of Aryan civilization. The SS, apparently, are descended from the Seven Dwarfs.
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.
And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing...