Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Porchia

“Certainties are arrived at only on foot” is a small, stubborn sentence that refuses the era’s favorite illusion: that conviction can be downloaded. Porchia, an Argentine poet of aphorisms who wrote like someone sanding language down to its last honest splinter, turns “certainty” from a mental trophy into a bodily experience. On foot, you move at human speed. You feel distance. You get tired. You misjudge a turn and have to live with it. The line insists that whatever we call “knowing” is rarely the product of brilliance; it’s the residue of time spent inside a problem, step after step, with no shortcut that doesn’t cost you something.

The subtext is quietly anti-authoritarian. Certainty that arrives by carriage - tradition, ideology, charisma, the confidence of institutions - can be inherited without being earned. Porchia’s certainty is earned through exposure: weather, delay, boredom, repetition. Walking is also solitary; it’s how you think when nobody is applauding. That matters for a poet who distrusted grand systems and preferred the intimate shock of a paradox.

Context sharpens the point. Porchia emigrated from Italy to Argentina and lived much of his life in modest circumstances, writing the spare, gnomic Voces. His work comes out of displacement and self-making, where certainty isn’t a doctrinal end state but a hard-won clarity. The aphorism works because it demotes certainty from certainty’s usual posture - clean, immediate, performative - and recasts it as something slow, slightly bruised, and therefore believable.