Daily Inspiration Quote by Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello takes a swing at the smug idea that facts arrive in the world fully dressed, self-supporting, and morally neutral. The sack image is plainspoken on purpose: a “fact” sounds sturdy until you realize it collapses without the messy stuffing of motive, memory, desire, and fear. He’s not rejecting reality; he’s puncturing the pretense that reality can be told without the human engine that produced it.

Coming from a playwright obsessed with masks, identity, and competing versions of truth, the line reads like a manifesto for modern drama. Pirandello’s theater keeps showing the same scandal: two people can share the same event and live in different worlds. A “fact” becomes a prop in an argument, an alibi, a weapon. When he says you have to put in “reasons and feelings,” he’s pointing to the backstage machinery that respectable discourse tries to hide. The subtext is accusatory: anyone who insists on “just the facts” is usually smuggling in a narrative anyway, just with the emotional plumbing concealed.

The intent is also ethical. If you strip causes and feelings away, you don’t get objectivity; you get distortion that flatters power. Courts, newspapers, families, governments: they all love an empty sack because it’s easier to carry and easier to throw. Pirandello insists that understanding requires weight. Not sentimentality, but causality plus interiority - the full, embarrassing density of why something happened, and why it mattered to the people trapped inside it.