Best 16 quotes of Giambattista Vico on MyQuotes

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.

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

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Este universo es una gran ciudad en la que con una ley eterna Dios condena a los necios a hacer una guerra contra sí mismos. (...) Si algún idiota, por maldad perversa, por relajación o por pereza, o incluso por imprudencia, actuara mal, siendo reo de alta traición, ¡hágase él mismo la guerra a sí mismo!

Sin religión alguna de una Divinidad, jamás los hombres en nación se concertaron; y así comode cosas físicas, o sea de los movimientos de los cuerpos, no cabeciencia segura sin la guía de las verdades abstractas de la matemática, así no cabe en las cosas morales sin el aprecio de las verdades abstractas de la metafísica, y por tanto sin la demostración de Dios.

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...