"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."

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

"Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale."

"There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation."

"To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido."

"It's quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education."

"There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."

"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."

"We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land."

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

"It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news."

"The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea."

"Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges."

"Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich."

"I'd lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there's always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us."

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

"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."

"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."

"I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing."

"The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever."

"In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner."

"And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?"