Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Porchia

Porchia’s line lands like a small trap: it lures you in with the familiar logic of reputation, then snaps shut on the fantasy of universal approval. “This one and that one” sounds almost dismissive, as if praise is a petty, transactional currency passed between individuals. Be decent to a few people and you get named, singled out, rewarded with the story that you are “good.” Try to be good to everyone and the story disappears. Not because goodness fails, but because it becomes background.

The subtext is less about ethics than about attention economics. Gratitude needs contrast; it needs a before-and-after, a scarcity that makes kindness legible. When goodness is selective, it reads as choice. When it’s universal, it reads as policy, atmosphere, expectation. People don’t praise air. They breathe it.

Porchia, an Argentine poet known for aphoristic fragments (his Voces are basically spiritual shrapnel), is operating in the tradition of the moral maxim but with a modernist bite: he distrusts applause and he distrusts the self who secretly wants it. The line also skewers the social role of “goodness” as a form of social capital. Publicly, we claim to admire impartial virtue; privately, we reward partiality because it flatters us. “Good to everyone” threatens the ego; it denies the listener the comforting sense of being specially chosen.

The intent, then, is to separate goodness from its PR. If your ethics depend on being said to be good, Porchia implies, they were never ethics - they were marketing.