Daily Inspiration Quote by Federico Fellini

Fellini’s line lands like a sly rebuke to the modern world’s favorite alibi: that commerce crowds out art. He flips it. Money isn’t the villain because it’s “everywhere” in the same banal way oxygen is everywhere. The real scarcity, he argues, is perception - people willing and able to notice the poetic charge already embedded in daily life, and then shape it into something shareable.

Coming from a director whose films turn parades, priests, carnivals, and ennui into luminous spectacle, the intent reads as both defense and dare. Fellini spent his career accused of indulgence, of making dream-logic when audiences wanted plot and studios wanted product. Here he’s insisting that poetry isn’t a luxury good you buy after paying the bills; it’s a mode of attention that can exist under any economic regime. The subtext is sharper: a culture can be materially rich and imaginatively bankrupt at the same time.

“What we lack are the poets” isn’t just a call for more artists; it’s a critique of how societies train people to become efficient consumers and compliant workers, not witnesses. Fellini’s poet is an animator of reality - someone who refuses to let experience harden into routine. In the late-20th-century media economy, where spectacle is often manufactured to sell, he’s pointing to a different kind of spectacle: the kind you can’t monetize easily because it begins as a private way of seeing, and ends as a public act of re-enchantment.