Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Porchia

A strange kind of fidelity sits inside this line: not clutching, not hoarding, but choosing emptiness as a form of devotion. Porchia flips the usual logic of loss. Empty hands aren’t evidence of deprivation; they’re a deliberate posture, almost a vow. The speaker refuses the easy consolation of replacement. If you fill your hands again, you risk pretending the earlier thing was disposable, interchangeable, erasable. Emptiness becomes a memorial you can carry in public.

The syntax does quiet magic. “For the sake of” frames absence as sacrifice, giving it moral weight without melodrama. And “what I have had in them” is pointedly vague. He won’t name the object - lover, child, faith, youth, homeland, a moment of certainty - because naming would shrink the line into a single anecdote. By keeping it indefinite, Porchia lets the reader supply their own vanished thing, turning the aphorism into a small, private trapdoor.

Porchia, an Italian-Argentine poet best known for his compressed, gnomic “Voices,” wrote in the key of the immigrant and the mystic: lives defined by severance, by what can’t be carried across borders or across time. The line also reads like an ethic of attention. Hands that are empty can still remember their shape around what’s gone; they can also resist the world’s pressure to move on, monetize grief, or convert longing into consumption. It’s a minimalist sentence that refuses minimal feeling.