Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist.

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968), an Italian-born Argentine writer, is best known for his aphoristic book *Voces* (“Voices”), first published in Buenos Aires in 1943 and expanded in later editions. The quoted sentence matches Porchia’s characteristic mode: brief, paradoxical reflections on ego, perception, and the conditions of human meaning-making. Rather than belonging to a speech or public occasion, it is best understood as one of the standalone “voices” Porchia composed over many years—observations shaped by a life of relative obscurity, manual work, and intense inward attention. In English, Porchia’s reception has been strongly mediated through translations and selections, which can affect exact wording.

Porchia treats “vanity” not merely as a moral flaw but as a generative force: the impulse toward self-display is portrayed as woven into “everything and everyone,” and as a precondition for visibility itself. The claim that “we would see nothing, and nothing would exist” suggests that what we call reality is inseparable from acts of presentation—selves, objects, and even ideas coming into being through a kind of showing-forth. The aphorism is double-edged: it satirizes vanity as “ridiculous,” yet also grants it an ontological role, implying that the ego’s theatricality helps constitute the world we perceive. It reads as both critique and reluctant acknowledgment of the ego’s creative power.