Quotes by Giambattista Vico

About Giambattista Vico:

Giovan Battista is recognized as one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism and was an apologist of classical antiquity. Vico is best known for his magnum opus, the Scienza Nuova of 1725, often published in English as New Science.
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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-philosophica...

Giambattista Vico

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

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

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

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 re...

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameGiambattista Vico
  • Descriptionphilosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist from Italy
  • AliasesGianbattista Vico; Giovan Battista Vico
  • BornJune 23, 1668
  • DiedJanuary 23, 1744
  • CountryItaly
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer
  • WorksThe New Science