Foucault's Pendulum Quotes

“Umberto Eco”

“A map is not the territory.”

“The Island of the Day Before”

“The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel.”

“There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”

“There are no bigger secrets, because the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little.”

“The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: Who is in his place?”

“They remind me of Tom and Jerry.”

“Wikipedia: Foucault's Pendulum”

“Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.”

“"Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."”

“And Belbo, now invincible, said, Ma gavte la nata.
• Translation: vent your pent-up hot air. (lit. "remove the cork")”

“He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet.”

“Do not expect too much of the end of the world. - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec”

“The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him.”

“If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.”

“You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justified birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was — full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.”

“Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers but disappoints all and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty into fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers ... .”

“Whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…”

“I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph. But I am here, and They are looking for me, thinking I possess the revelation They sordidly desire. It isn't enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to interrogate.”