Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Porchia

Truth, in Porchia's hands, isn't a noble beacon; it's a social liability with a body count. "Truth has very few friends" sounds almost quaint until the second clause snaps shut like a trap: "and those few are suicides". The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that honesty is merely hard but ultimately rewarded. Porchia treats truth-telling as a form of self-erasure: to befriend truth is to step out of the protections that make ordinary life possible - reputation, belonging, even the small daily compromises that keep relationships intact.

The subtext is less about literal suicide than about the slow, voluntary death of the self that wants approval. If you insist on seeing clearly, you forfeit the social oxygen of consensus. Porchia is pointing at a brutal asymmetry: lies are communal; truth is solitary. Communities can organize around a shared fiction with ease, but truth is often specific, inconvenient, and indifferent to group needs. That indifference is what makes it "friendless."

Context matters: Porchia, an Italian immigrant in Argentina, wrote aphorisms shaped by austerity and dislocation, the voice of someone watching how survival often depends on strategic silence. In the early 20th century - amid political upheavals, ideologies, and mass persuasion - "truth" wasn't just personal sincerity; it was something regimes and crowds managed, punished, or repackaged. The genius of the line is its cynicism without spectacle: it's not calling for heroism. It's warning that the cost of intimate proximity to truth is a kind of chosen extinction - not romantic, not triumphant, just unprotected.