R. G. Collingwood Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

R. G. Collingwood
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.

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

R. G. Collingwood
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.

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

R. G. Collingwood
You can only solve a problem which you recognize to be a problem.

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

R. G. Collingwood
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.

R. G. Collingwood
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.

R. G. Collingwood
Egregious blunder! A beginner in physics or chemistry does not know what matter is, and if he thinks he does it is the duty of his teacher to disabuse him; but he knows what physics or chemistry is; it is the stuff in this red textbook, or the stuff old So-and-So teaches, or the stuff we have on Tuesday mornings.

R. G. Collingwood
Nature was no longer a sphinx asking man riddles; it was man that did the asking, and Nature, now, that he put to the torture until she gave him the answer to his questions.

R. G. Collingwood
The beginner has in his head a definition of the science; a childish definition, perhaps, but still a definition; on the science's subject-matter he has no definition at all.

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

R. G. Collingwood
Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge; assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force.

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

R. G. Collingwood
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

R. G. Collingwood
Science in general does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it.

R. G. Collingwood
The scientist collects crude facts, but he stores only what he has converted them into: laws. Laws are the body of science. Laws are what it is a scientist's business to come at. Laws are what a master-scientist has to teach. Laws are what a pupil-scientist has to learn.

R. G. Collingwood
A physiologist... can certainly offer a definition of life; but this will only be an interim report on the progress of physiology to date. For him, as for the beginner, it is the nature of physiology that is relatively certain; it is the nature of life that is relatively vague.

R. G. Collingwood
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.

R. G. Collingwood
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.

R. G. Collingwood
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.

R. G. Collingwood
Science is finding things out; and in that sense history is science.

R. G. Collingwood