Top 17 Quotes & Sayings by Giambattista Vico

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.

Italian - Philosopher | June 23, 1668 - January 23, 1744

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

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

Giambattista Vico

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

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

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

One truly understands only what one can create.

Giambattista Vico

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding arises through making

Giambattista Vico