24 Quotes by Giambattista Vico

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

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 conform to the nature of the men governed.

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

Understanding arises through making

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.

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

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

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.