Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Porchia

Porchia’s line tilts devotion into discomfort: it admits the abundance of the divine while insisting that abundance doesn’t satisfy the particular hunger of being human. “God has given a great deal to man” carries the familiar inventory of gifts that religion and philosophy like to name - breath, time, conscience, the world itself. Then the sentence pivots on a small, almost plaintive “but,” and suddenly the real subject arrives: the stubborn, untheological need for recognition, care, solidarity. Not salvation, but companionship.

The wit is in how gently accusatory it is. It doesn’t deny grace; it implies that grace can’t substitute for other people doing their part. Porchia makes “man” both collective and intimate: humanity as a species endowed with plenty, and the individual who still wants something that only another individual can supply. The phrase “something from man” stays deliberately vague, letting the reader fill in the moral bill: kindness, fairness, responsibility, a hand reached out instead of a sermon delivered.

Context matters. Porchia, an Italian-Argentine poet of aphorisms, wrote in a century marked by mass politics, migration, and mechanized cruelty - eras where people invoked God loudly while failing one another quietly. The line reads like a secular prayer smuggled into religious language: if you want to honor what you’ve been given, stop outsourcing human duty to heaven.