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

Categorized in : Mean Men Self

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

Robin G. Collingwood

thank-you-god issues thank-god

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

Robin G. Collingwood

mind history past

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

Robin G. Collingwood

medicine community art

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.

Robin G. Collingwood

effort artist ideas

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

Robin G. Collingwood

motivational inspirational history

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

Robin G. Collingwood

done men history

Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.

Robin G. Collingwood

classical-art form art

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.

Robin G. Collingwood

perfect work men

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

horse learning science

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

parenthood purpose desire

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

Robin G. Collingwood

generations want children

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

growing-up lying children

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

risk artist heart

All history is the history of thought.

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

freedom success men

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

bottom shame men

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.

Robin G. Collingwood

twentieth-century chiefs century

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

Robin G. Collingwood

generations history way

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

Robin G. Collingwood

paradoxical instant artist

The dance is the mother of all languages.

Robin G. Collingwood

dancing dance mother