G Collingwood Quotes

Rational truth - and all truth is rational - is essentially that which can justify itself under criticism and in discussion. ~ R.G. Collingwood

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

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? ~ Robin G. Collingwood

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

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

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. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

All history is the history of thought, ~ Robin G. Collingwood

The failure of art is, as we have said, not a complete failure. Substantial truth is revealed to us, we are not cheated of that; but it is revealed only in the equivocal form of beauty, submerged, so to speak, in the flood of aesthetic emotion. It is only because truth is revealed in it that the emotion is aesthetic; but emotional truth, truth in the guise of beauty, is not truth at all in the formal sense Art asserts nothing; and truth as such is matter of assertion. To be itself, it demands logical form. Art fails us because it does not assert. It is pregnant with a message that it cannot deliver. To ~ 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. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

...philosophy does not, like exact or empirical science, bring us to know things of which we were simply ignorant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we already knew in some way; and indeed it follows from our own hypothesis; for if the species of a philosophical genus overlap, the distinction between the known and the unknown, which in a non-philosophical subject-matter involves a difference be-tween two mutually exclusive classes of truths, in a philosophical subject-matter im- plies that we may both know and not know the same thing; a paradox which disappears in the light of the notion of a scale of forms of knowledge, where coming to know means coming to know in a different and better way. ~ R.G. Collingwood

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

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. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history. ~ Robin 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. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness ~ Robin G. Collingwood

Thus natural science is not a way of knowing the real world; its value lies not in its truth but in its utility; by scientific thought we do not know nature, we dismember it in order to master it. ~ R.G. Collingwood

R. G. Collingwood said that studying the past teaches us three things" what it is to be a man - or a woman; what it is to be the kind of woman you are; and what it is to be the kind of woman you are and nobody else.... One thing I learned is that heroes don't always wear capes... And I learned that big things can start small. Look what throwing some tea into Boston Harbor led to. ~ Kelly Jamieson

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

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

Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.

This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development. ~ 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. ~ Robin 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 ~ Robin G. Collingwood

Nothing capable of being memorized is history. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

The idea that this end of philosophy - at least, of political philosophy and (I claim) moral philosophy - has close relations with history overlaps with a more ambitious view held by a consistently underestimated Oxford philosopher, R. G. Collingwood. The trouble with Collingwood's kind of commitment is that it requires one to know some history. My two associates in the view I am sketching are Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. They are both Roman Catholics, though of different sorts. I used to find this a disquieting fact but no longer do so. All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt respectively the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. In any case, we all assume some historical commitments, they on a more ambitious scale than I, and perhaps there is a rather nervous competition for who writes the most irresponsible history. ~ Bernard Williams

We're not going to get carried away. Well, we are going to for the next couple of days! ~ Paul Collingwood

The culture has got to be only the best for Collingwood. I reckon Collingwood accepts defeat far too easily and accepts mediocrity far too easily, ~ Eddie McGuire

Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter. ~ Cuthbert Collingwood, 1st Baron Collingwood

Charles was at this time very fond of inventing games for the amusement of his brothers and sisters; ~ Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

Praise everybody, I say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

It always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned. Talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless. ~ Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books. ~ Stuart Dodgson Collingwood