Robin G. Collingwood Quotes

Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that... he is going to be a beginner all his life.

Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do.

Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

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 ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

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 one can do, ... , and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one's own life ... Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.

Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.

The children of each generation are taught to want what they are taught they must not have.

As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

All history is the history of thought.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

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 risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts

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, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.

The dance is the mother of all languages.

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 a purpose or intention of parenthood.

The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.

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?

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 a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.

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, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life.