Giambattista Vico Quotes

Achilles replies that there is no equality of right between the
weak and the strong, for men have never made pacts with lions nor
have lambs and wolves ever shared the same desires. This was the law of the heroic gentes, based on the belief that the strong were of a different and more noble nature than the weak. Hence arose that law of war through which, by force of arms, the victors deprive the defeated of all their rights of natural liberty, so that the Romans took them
as slaves in place of material things.

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

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

... 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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.

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

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.

With the sole aim of liberating themselves from the servitude of religion, which alone could preserve them in society, and, lacking any other restraint, they turned their backs upon the true God of their fathers, Adam and Noah, and descended into a bestial liberty in which, dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth, they lost their language and weakened every social custom.

Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.

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.