Quotes from Robin G. Collingwood

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

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.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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