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

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

We become aware of the void as we fill it.

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

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

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

The fear of separation is all that unites.

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

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

A large heart can be filled with very little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

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.

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

Beyond my body my veins are invisible.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.

Man goes nowhere, everything comes to man like tomorrow.

All the suns labor to kindle your flame and a microbe puts it out.

More grievous than tears is the sight of them.

My truths do not last long in me. Not as long as those that are not mine.

He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.

Certainties are arrived at only on foot.

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