Robin G. Collingwood Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

Robin G. Collingwood

#3. 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

#4. The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

Robin G. Collingwood

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

Robin G. Collingwood

#6. The dance is the mother of all languages.

Robin G. Collingwood

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

Robin G. Collingwood

#8. 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

#9. All history is the history of thought,

Robin G. Collingwood

#10. Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

Robin G. Collingwood

#11. Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.

Robin G. Collingwood

#12. 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

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

Robin G. Collingwood

#14. 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.

Robin G. Collingwood

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Robin G. Collingwood

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

Robin G. Collingwood

#19. 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.

Robin G. Collingwood