Daily Inspiration Quote by Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello draws a bright, almost insulting line: exist like a creature, or live like a self-authoring mind. The bite is in his hierarchy. “A little above the level of the beasts and plants” isn’t nature-poetry; it’s a provocation. He’s saying that mere biological persistence is an unthinking default, a kind of sleepwalking. To qualify as “true,” a person has to do something harder than survive: manufacture significance.

The phrasing stages a conflict Pirandello obsessed over in his plays: life as raw flux versus the “forms” we impose to make it legible. “Without knowing how to live” isn’t etiquette or moral instruction; it’s a diagnosis of modern drift, the sense that the inherited scripts (religion, social roles, bourgeois respectability) no longer feel credible, yet we keep performing them. His answer isn’t a return to tradition but a demand for authorship: “a meaning and a value of his own.” That last clause is the pivot. Meaning isn’t discovered like a fact; it’s declared, built, acted into being.

There’s also a sly warning embedded in the bravado. If meaning is “of his own,” it’s unstable, contested, and lonely; you don’t get the comfort of consensus. Pirandello’s theatrical context matters here: he watched identity fracture under the gaze of others, watched “truth” multiply depending on who’s looking. So the quote reads like a challenge and a concession at once: you must create your value, and the world may still refuse to ratify it. That tension is the engine of his modernism.