Vico Quotes

#1. Efferfreshpainted livy, in beautific repose, upon the silence of the dead, from pharoph the nextfirst down to ramescheckles the last bust thing. The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.

James Joyce

#2. 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

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

Giambattista Vico

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. You can't be a major company today without paying attention to celebrities. They are the leaders in beauty and fashion.

Aerin Lauder

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

Giambattista Vico

#9. 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

#10. Come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain

W.S. Merwin

#11. Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

Mason Cooley

#12. We did it, we bashed them wee Potter's the one, and Voldy's gone moldy, so now let's have fun!

J.K. Rowling

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

Giambattista Vico

#14. Picture yourself five years from now. Where do you want to be? Remember that. Every day. That's how you'll get there.

Mary E. Pearson

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

#19. 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

#20. It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.

Paul Singer

#21. 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

#22. As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.

Gore Vidal

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

Giambattista Vico

#24. 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

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

Giambattista Vico

#26. Love God, then do what you will.

Saint Augustine

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

Giambattista Vico

#28. The traditional dress of the Australian cricketer is the baggy green cap on the head and the chip on the shoulder. Both are ritualistically assumed

Simon Barnes

#29. ... 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