Giambattista Vico Quotes

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed. ~ Giambattista Vico

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

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

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

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak. ~ Giambattista Vico

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

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

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

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. ~ Giambattista Vico

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

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

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

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

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

... 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

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. ~ Giambattista Vico

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. ~ Giambattista Vico

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

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... ~ Giambattista Vico

I want a woman to feel the cut of the scissors in the clothes. ~ Giambattista Valli

In a few years, the date-tree had grown as tall as a woman, and out of it came a Fairy, who said to Zezolla, "What do you wish for? ~ Giambattista Basile

The hardest thing in fashion is not to be known for a logo, but to be known for a silhouette. ~ Giambattista Valli

Chic is when a woman is in harmony with herself. ~ Giambattista Valli

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

It has always been more difficult for a man to keep than to get; for, in the one case, fortune aids, which often assists injustice; but, in the other case, sense is required. Therefore, we often see a person deficient in cleverness rise to wealth; and then, from want of sense, roll head over heels to the bottom. ~ Giambattista Basile

My clothes are for the international jet set. They are very much for the red carpet. ~ Giambattista Valli

Truly, a command of gall cannot be obeyed like one of sugar. A man must require just and reasonable things; if he would see the scales of obedience properly trimmed. From orders which are improper, springs resistance, which is not easily overcome. ~ Giambattista Basile

Capucci was the biggest schooling I had. It wasn't just about the technical knowledge, such as color and volume, but also about the secret rules, and the beautiful codes of respect between the atelier and the master. ~ Giambattista Valli

At Ungaro, I discovered the flou and the language of Paris. ~ Giambattista Valli

The letters don't get their true delight, when done in haste & discomfort, nor merely done with diligence & pain, but first when they are created with love and passion. ~ Giambattista Bodoni

Having observed the forces of all things natural and celestial and having examined by painstaking investigation the sympathy among those things, brings into the open powers hidden and stored away in nature; thus, magic links lower things (as if they were magical enticements) to the gifts of higher things ... so that astonishing miracles thereby occur. ~ Giambattista Della Porta

Plenty of white space and generous line spacing,and don't make the type size too miserly. Then you will be assured of a product fit for a king. ~ Giambattista Bodoni

I love Yves Saint Laurent and Giambattista Valli and Givenchy, and I get given quite a lot, but perhaps nothing is as wonderful as the white fake leather trench coat I got when I was 15. ~ Natalia Vodianova

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

...the Moon, the enemy of poets...

("Merchant's Two Sons") ~ Giambattista Basile

Rome holds my psyche in balance. Whenever I'm there, it's like a holiday. ~ Giambattista Valli

Actually, what we really need to remember about Galileo is that most of the people who use his name in argument could barely spell it, let alone tell us what actually happened to the man. His case is used over and over again because critics can't think of any other scientists who were mistreated by the Church. And in this instance they're right. There may have been some people in the scientific world who did not enjoy Church support and were even challenged by Catholicism but, sorry to disappoint, there weren't very many of them. The Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery, and those who refer to Galileo tend to forget that Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization, was a devout Catholic, as was Alexander Fleming, who gave us penicillin. Or Father Nicolaus Copernicus, who first proposed the theory of the earth revolving around the sun - this was precisely what Galileo stated, but Copernicus taught it as theory and not fact. Or Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, who proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In the field of acceleration, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli changed the way we understand that particular science; the father of modern Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher, and the Yugoslavian Fr. Roger Boscovich was the founder of modern atomic theory. ~ Michael Coren