The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Umberto EcoRead
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Religion provides people with hope and justification to navigate life's challenges.
Umberto Eco's quote highlights the psychological necessity that many individuals find in religion, suggesting that faith serves as a important foundation for understanding life's complexities and hardships. Without the framework that religion provides, many may struggle to find meaning, direction, and hope in their existence.
Themes
ReligionHopeJustificationPsychologyLife
In practice
Example use cases
During a community seminar on mental health, one could use this quote to emphasize the role of faith in coping strategies.
More from Umberto Eco
All quotes →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.
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But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong.
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You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
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"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
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The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Umberto EcoRead
Similar quotes
The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
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But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.
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It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
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No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.
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We hear tears loudly on this side of Heaven. What we don't take time to contemplate are the even louder cheers on the other side of death's valley.
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Our brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant.
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