Highlights from The Name of the Rose

﻿”there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.”

He seemed unable to think save with his hands, an attribute I considered then worthier of a mechanic.

Such is the power of the truth that, like good, it is its own propagator.

It does not seem to me that they were preaching things contrary to the Gospel, but when the session of earthly things is in question, it is difficult for men to reason justly.

When female nature, naturally so perverse, becomes sublime through holiness, then it can be the noblest vehicle of grace.

In the Italian city, on the contrary, you must have noticed that goods serve to procure money. And even priests, bishops, even religious orders have to take money into account. This is why, naturally, rebellion against power takes the form of a call to poverty. The rebels against power are those denied any connection with money, and so every call to poverty provokes great tension and argument, and the whole city, from bishop to magistrate, considers a personal enemy the one who preaches poverty too much.

The simple are meat for slaughter, to be used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power, and to be sacrificed when they are no longer of use.

He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.

“But why do some people support them?” “Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power.”

I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon, and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.


I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.



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