Quotes from 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.

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.

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

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

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.

The Roman jurisconsults established worship of God as the first and foremost part of the natural law of the gentes. For where there is neither rule of law nor force of arms, and men are accordingly in a state of complete freedom, they can neither enter nor remain in society with others except through fear of a force superior to them all, and, therefore, through fear of a divinity common to all. This fear of divinity is called 'religion'.

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.

We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead.

Cadmus the Phoenician founds Thebes in Boeotia and introduces vulgar letters into Greece. Year of the world 2448.] 72 Since he introduced the Phoenician alphabet there, Boeotia should have been from its literate beginnings the most ingenious of all the nations of Greece; but it produced men of such doltish minds that "Boeotian" became a proverbial term for a man of slow wit.

The giants were by nature of enormous build, like those gross wild creatures which travelers report finding at the foot of America, in the country of the so-called Patagones [Big Feet].

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.

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth [D4].

C6 Now Vico here agrees with Aristotle. When he calls the world of nations the world of men, he means that what were beasts in the world of nature become men in the world of nations, and it is by the becoming of the world of nations that they become men. Or, as he puts it otherwise, in a sense they make the world of nations, and in the same sense they make themselves by making it [367, 520, 692].

He lays down as an axiom Dio's dictum that "custom is like a king and law1 like a tyrant; which we must understand as referring to reasonable custom and to law1 not animated by natural reason.

Bacon, like Vico, held that the ancients were not classic models for the moderns, but their primitive ancestors – an idea that lies at the core of the New Science.

se vogliamo entrare nella via del piacere con viltà, disprezzo e schiavitù loro e delle loro nazioni, o in quella della virtù con onore, gloria e felicità" SN, 1411

Insomma, da tutto ciò che si è in quest'opera ragionato, è da finalmente conchiudersi che questa scienza porta indivisibilmente seco lo studio della pietà, e che, se non siesi pio, non si può daddovero esser saggio, SN 1112