Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Porchia

Desire collapses the moment it becomes fully conscious of itself. Porchia’s line is a small paradox that behaves like a trapdoor: “I stop wanting what I am looking for, looking for it.” The comma is doing the heavy lifting, turning “looking” from an action into a mirror. The instant the speaker notices the hunt, the object loses its power. Wanting depends on distance, on the fantasy that something out there will complete the self; the act of searching exposes that fantasy as a mechanism.

Porchia, an aphoristic poet who prized brevity and inwardness, writes as if he’s filing down language to its nerve. The sentence carries the logic of mystical traditions (and modern psychology) without announcing either: attention can dissolve craving; self-observation interrupts compulsion. It’s not that the sought-after thing is unworthy, but that the wanting was never really about the thing. It was about the pursuit, the story of lack.

There’s also a sly critique of modern ambition baked in. “Looking for it” reads like a default state: the restless consumer, the careerist, the romantic swiper, all animated by a promise that recedes as they approach. Porchia suggests an escape hatch that isn’t acquisition but recognition. When you see yourself seeking, you step outside the trance.

The line works because it refuses consolation. It offers no replacement object, no triumphant self-help pivot. It just names the flicker where desire turns into awareness and, in that instant, quietly unhooks.