Vico Giambattista Quotes & Sayings

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute. — Giambattista Vico

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed. — Giambattista Vico

A city divided by religion is either already in ruins or close to it. — Giambattista Vico

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself. — Giambattista Vico

The Roman jurisconsults established worship of God as the first and foremost part of the natural law of the gentes. For where there is neither rule of law nor force of arms, and men are accordingly in a state of complete freedom, they can neither enter nor remain in society with others except through fear of a force superior to them all, and, therefore, through fear of a divinity common to all. This fear of divinity is called 'religion'. — Giambattista Vico

Political Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise. — Giambattista Vico

But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called Sympathetic Nature. — Giambattista Vico

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak. — Giambattista Vico

First come the wild and solitary, then those tied to a few in faithful friendship, next those who side with the manyto attain civil ends, and finally, in pursuit of particular ends of utilityor pleasure, the whollydissolute , who, amidst the great multitude of bodies, return to the first solitude of the soul. — Giambattista Vico

peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice. — Giambattista Vico

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth. — Giambattista Vico

Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things. — Giambattista Vico

It is true that men themselves made this world of nations ... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves. — Giambattista Vico

People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind. — Giambattista Vico

Achilles replies that there is no equality of right between the
weak and the strong, for men have never made pacts with lions nor
have lambs and wolves ever shared the same desires. This was the law of the heroic gentes, based on the belief that the strong were of a different and more noble nature than the weak. Hence arose that law of war through which, by force of arms, the victors deprive the defeated of all their rights of natural liberty, so that the Romans took them
as slaves in place of material things. — Giambattista Vico

One truly understands only what one can create. — Giambattista Vico

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life. — Giambattista Vico

Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars. — Giambattista Vico

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things. — Giambattista Vico

... rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them ... imaginative metaphysics shows that
man becomes all things by not understanding them ... for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. — Giambattista Vico

Governments must be conformable to the nature of the governed; governments are even a result of that nature. — Giambattista Vico

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets... — Giambattista Vico

Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race. — Giambattista Vico

How, for example, after liberating themselves from servitude to the religion of God, the creator of the world and of Adam, which alone could hold them within duty and, therefore, within society, did the impious life of those first men from whom the gentile nations arose bring them to disperse in a ferine wandering through the great forest of the earth, grown dense through saturation by the waters of the Flood? And how, constrained to seek food and water and, even more, to save themselves from the wild animals in which the great forest must unfortunately have abounded, with men frequently abandoning their women and mothers their children, and with no way of reuniting, did their descendants gradually come to forget the language of Adam and, without language or any thought other than that of satisfying their hunger, thirst and the foment of their lust, deaden all sense of humanity? — Giambattista Vico

With the sole aim of liberating themselves from the servitude of religion, which alone could preserve them in society, and, lacking any other restraint, they turned their backs upon the true God of their fathers, Adam and Noah, and descended into a bestial liberty in which, dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth, they lost their language and weakened every social custom. — Giambattista Vico

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. — Giambattista Vico

In every [other] pursuit men without natural aptitude succeed by obstinate study of technique, but who is not a poet by nature can never become one by art. — Giambattista Vico