New Science Quotes

“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...”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“A city divided by religion is either already in ruins or close to it.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“... 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.”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“Achilles replies that there is no equality of right between the
weak and the strong, for men have never made pacts with lions nor
have lambs and wolves ever shared the same desires. This was the law of the heroic gentes, based on the belief that the strong were of a different and more noble nature than the weak. Hence arose that law of war through which, by force of arms, the victors deprive the defeated of all their rights of natural liberty, so that the Romans took them
as slaves in place of material things.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“Men at first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“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].”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth [D4].”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“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!”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“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’.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“Governments must conform to the nature of the people governed. This axiom indicates that, by the nature of human civil institutions, the public school of rulers is the morality of the people.”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“That the flood was world-wide is proved, not indeed by the philological evidence of Martin Schoock, for it is far too slight, nor by the astrological evidence of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, followed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. For this latter evidence is too uncertain, indeed quite false, relying as it does on the Alphonsine Tables, which were refuted by the Jews and are now refuted by the Christians, who, having rejected the calculations of Eusebius and Bede, now follow those of Philo the Jew [54]. But our demonstration will be drawn from physical histories discerned in the fables [192–195, 380].”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“132 Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“[Saturn, or the Latin age of the gods. Year of the world 2491.] 73 This is the age of the gods beginning among the nations of Latium and corresponding in character to the golden age of the Greeks, among whom our mythology will show [544ff] that the first gold was grain, by the harvests of which for many centuries the first nations counted their years [407]. Saturn was so called by the Latins from sati, sown [fields], and is called Chronos by the Greeks, among whom chronos means time, whence comes the word chronology.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“[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.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“... 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.”
― Giambattista Vico, New Science

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“Monarchies conform best to human nature and therefore constitute the most durable form of state.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, Vico: The First New Science

“Los gobiernos deben conformase a la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados, porque de la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados salen sus gobiernos, por eso las leyes deben ser administradas en conformidad a los gobiernos y, por esa causa, deben interpretarse a partir de la forma de los gobiernos.”
― Giambattista Vico, Ciencia nueva

“Los gobiernos deben conformase a la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados, porque de la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados salen sus gobiernos.”
― Giambattista Vico, Ciencia nueva

“Los gobiernos deben conformase a la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados.”
― Giambattista Vico, Ciencia nueva

“En las monarquías los héroes son los que se sacrifican por la gloria y grandeza de sus soberanos. De donde ha de concluirse que los pueblos afligidos desean a un héroe de este tipo, los filósofos lo explican y los poetas lo imaginan; pero la naturaleza civil, como hemos explicado en una dignidad, no aporta este tipo de beneficios”
― Giambattista Vico, Ciencia nueva

“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].”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

“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.”
― Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"