Clay

“I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“The polemical title is “The Force of Falsity,” and in the lecture I wanted to show how a number of ideas that today we consider false actually changed the world (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) and how, in the best instances, false beliefs and discoveries totally without credibility could then lead to the discovery of something true (or at least something we consider true today). In the field of the sciences, this mechanism is known as serendipity.”
― Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

“For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Let us forget for a moment that some of these false tales produced positive effects, while others produced horror and shame. All created something, for better or worse. Nothing in their success is inexplicable. What represents a problem is rather the way they managed to replace other tales that today we consider true.”
― Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy