Giambattista Vico Quotes

#1. ... 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

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

#4. 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

#5. Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.

Giambattista Vico

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Giambattista Vico

#9. One truly understands only what one can create.

Giambattista Vico

#10. 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

#11. A city divided by religion is either already in ruins or close to it.

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

#14. 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

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

Giambattista Vico

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Giambattista Vico