Robin G. Collingwood Quotes

23 quotes in 334 categories

• Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do.
• A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that ... he…
• To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being…
• Nothing capable of being memorized is history.
• The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.
• All history is the history of thought,
• What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.
• To regard such a positive mental science [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature,…
• Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.
• If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in…
• The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at the…
• There is no truer and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work…
• The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.
• Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.
• The romantic artist expects people to ask, 'What has he got to say?' The classical artist expects them to ask, 'How does he say it?
• Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own,…
• Parenthood is not an object of appetite or even desire. It is an object of will. There is no appetite for parenthood; there is only…
• The dance is the mother of all languages.
• The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.
• The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

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