He who makes a paradise of his bread makes a hell of his hunger.

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968), an Italian-born writer who lived in Argentina, is best known for his aphoristic book *Voces* (“Voices”), first published in Buenos Aires in 1943 and expanded in later editions. The line “He who makes a paradise of his bread makes a hell of his hunger” fits Porchia’s characteristic mode: brief, paradoxical moral observations that read like distilled reflections on need, desire, and self-deception. In *Voces*, Porchia often turns everyday necessities (bread, hunger, silence, love) into metaphysical symbols, using them to probe how people transform basic conditions of life into psychological or spiritual traps.

Porchia contrasts satisfaction with dependence. “Bread” suggests what sustains us—material comfort, routine pleasures, or any single source of security. To make a “paradise” of it is to elevate that necessity into an ultimate good, treating it as salvation rather than sustenance. The cost is that “hunger”—need, lack, desire, vulnerability—becomes intolerable, a “hell,” because one’s happiness is now hostage to continual provision. The aphorism warns against idolizing comforts: when we absolutize what merely meets a need, we intensify fear of deprivation and turn ordinary longing into torment.