Giambattista Vico Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.

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

Understanding arises through making

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.

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

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

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.

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

One truly understands only what one can create.

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.