Antonio Porchia

“I have been my own disciple and my own master. And I have been a good disciple but a bad master.”

“He who makes a paradise of his bread makes a hell of his hunger.”

“Certainties are arrived at only on foot.”

“If you are good to this one and that one, this one and that one will say that you are good. If you are good to everyone, no one will say that you are good.”

“He who does not know how to believe, should not know.”

“My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.”

“You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own.”

“I keep my hands empty for the sake of what I have had in them.”

“In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.”

“Those who gave away their wings are sad not to see them fly.”

“Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.”

“Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.”

“They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.”

“What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.”

“Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.”

“He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with.”

“Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.”

“He who does not know how to create should not know.”

“What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.”

“That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.”