Giambattista Vico Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
Our Science comes to be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, and the deeds of mankind. From these three we shall derive the principles of the history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles of universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have lacked.

Giambattista Vico
In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity, a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of man.

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

Giambattista Vico
The nature of things is nothing other than that they come into being at certain times and in certain ways. Wherever the same circumstances are present, the same phenomena arise and no others.

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
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
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
The practice of giving to young men the elements of the science of magnitude on the algebraic method, chills all that is lively and vigorous in the youthful mind, clouds the imagination, debilitates the memory, dulls the ingenuity, and enervates the intellect.

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

Giambattista Vico