Quotes from Giambattista Vico

Jamás existió en el mundo nación de ateos, pues empezaron todas con alguna religión, y las religiones, sin salvedad, echaron su raigambre en aquel deseo, naturalmente común a los hombres, de vivir eternamente: y este universal deseo de la naturaleza humana nace de un común sentido, celado en la hondura de la mente humana, según el cual los ánimos de los hombres son inmortales.

This is the Hermes who, on the authority of Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods [3.22.56], was called by the Egyptians [Thoth or] Theuth (from which the Greeks are said to have derived theos),

And as if, finally, providence had not made provision for this human necessity: so that, lacking letters, all nations in their barbarous period were first founded on customs, and [only] later, having become civilized, were governed by [statutory] laws!

Sin religión alguna de una Divinidad, jamás los hombres en nación se concertaron; y así comode cosas físicas, o sea de los movimientos de los cuerpos, no cabeciencia segura sin la guía de las verdades abstractas de la matemática, así no cabe en las cosas morales sin el aprecio de las verdades abstractas de la metafísica, y por tanto sin la demostración de Dios.

Los hombres ambiciosos que afectan señoría en sus ciudades, ábrense en ellas rumbo mostrándose parciales de la muchedumbre, y halagándola con ciertos simulacros o apariencias de libertad.

Homer, whose own language was certainly heroic, in five passages from his two poems [437] mentions a more ancient language and calls it "the language of the gods.

Varro had the diligence to collect thirty thousand names of gods—for the Greeks counted that many. These were related to as many needs of the physical, moral, economic, or civil life of the earliest times.

First come the wild and solitary, then those tied to a few in faithful friendship, next those who side with the manyto attain civil ends, and finally, in pursuit of particular ends of utilityor pleasure, the whollydissolute , who, amidst the great multitude of bodies, return to the first solitude of the soul.

Este universo es una gran ciudad en la que con una ley eterna Dios condena a los necios a hacer una guerra contra sí mismos. (...) Si algún idiota, por maldad perversa, por relajación o por pereza, o incluso por imprudencia, actuara mal, siendo reo de alta traición, ¡hágase él mismo la guerra a sí mismo!

Men at first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind.

Monarchies conform best to human nature and therefore constitute the most durable form of state.

195 This same axiom with its preceding postulate should make it clear to us that for a long period of time the impious races of the three children of Noah, having lapsed into a state of bestiality, went wandering like wild beasts until they were scattered and dispersed through the great forest of the earth, and that with their bestial education giants had sprung up and existed among them at the time when the heavens thundered for the first time after the flood [369ff].

Nations that have their own religions and laws, cultivating the language appropriate to them, and which they defend with their own arms, such nations alone are properly free. But Providence ordains that when nations lack these things, rather than annihilate themselves in the rash of civil wars that breakout when peoples trample on their laws and religions, they proceed to submit themselves to preservation under other better nations.

omne ignotum pro magnifico est).

It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.

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.

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