Antonio Porchia Quotes

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

I stop wanting what I am looking for, looking for it.

Night is a world lit by itself.

The shadows: some hide, others reveal.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

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

I would go to heaven, but I would take my hell; I would not go alone.

Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance.

I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received.

Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.

A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.

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

When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.

When your suffering is a little greater than my suffering I feel that I am a little cruel.

We become aware of the void as we fill it.

The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.

You think you are killing me. I think you are committing suicide.

The chains that bind us the most closely are the ones we have broken.

The fear of separation is all that unites.

Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.

I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is.

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.

A large heart can be filled with very little.

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.

We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself.

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

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

Even the smallest of creatures carries the sun in its eyes.

You know so much about me and yet you don't understand me. To know is not to understand. We could know everything and still not understand anything.

If you do not raise your eyes you will think that you are the highest point.

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

Yes, this is what good is: to forgive evil. There is no other good.

Beyond my body my veins are invisible.

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

You are fastened to them and cannot understand how, because they are not fastened to you.

When I break any of the chains that bind me I feel that I make myself smaller.

Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.

I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.

Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him.

A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.

Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.

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.

Man goes nowhere, everything comes to man like tomorrow.

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

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

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

Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.

A little candor never leaves me. It is what protects me.

Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.