31 Quotes by 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.

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.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

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

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.

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.

All history is the history of thought,

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

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.