Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968), an Italian-born Argentine writer, is best known for his aphoristic book *Voces* (“Voices”), first published in Buenos Aires in the early 1940s and expanded in later editions. The quoted line fits Porchia’s characteristic mode: brief, paradoxical statements that read like spiritual or existential “voices,” often reflecting on pride, humility, desire, and inner suffering. Rather than being tied to a single public speech or event, the remark is best understood as one of Porchia’s standalone aphorisms, composed within the contemplative, minimalist tradition of moral and metaphysical maxims that *Voces* exemplifies.

Porchia reverses a common metaphor: we imagine suffering as “below” us—something degrading to be escaped by “rising” into success, status, or happiness. He suggests the opposite: suffering is “above,” meaning it can be a higher condition—closer to truth, lucidity, or spiritual elevation—while the urge to rise may actually be an evasion. The final sentence sharpens the irony: because everyone assumes suffering is low, everyone strives upward, yet that striving may lead directly toward suffering (or toward the kind of suffering that accompanies ambition). The aphorism critiques simplistic hierarchies of value and exposes how desire and self-improvement narratives can misread the moral meaning of pain.