Top 15 R. G. Collingwood Quotes

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.

History is for human self-knowledge…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.

The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into a scientific symbolism, ... represents not a progressive drying-up of emotion, but its progressive articulation and specialization. ... We are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressing them.

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.

Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in the sixteenth century; and it is sometimes thought by people who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not worth preserving.

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.

...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.

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

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.

The world of imagination is thought implicit, the world of thought, so called, is thought explicit.

When the mind becomes conscious of itself as thought it simultaneously becomes conscious of itself as action. Thought and action, truth and freedom ('ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free') are inseparable, and are in fact correlative aspects of an indivisible reality. Hence they became simultaneously explicit in the mind's process of self-discovery.

Art is the cutting edge of the mind, the perpetual out-reaching of thought into the unknown, the act in which thought eternally sets itself a fresh problem. So play, which is identical with art, is the attitude which looks at the world as an infinite and indeterminate field for activity, a perpetual adventure. All life is an adventure, and the spirit of adventure, wherever it is found, can never be out of place. It is true that life is much more than this; it is never, even its most irresponsible moments, a mere adventure; but this it is; and therefore the spirit of play, the spirit of eternal youth, is the foundation and beginning of all real life. 1

Mengajukan tanya yang, kau tahu, kelak tak berjawab adalah dosa mendasar dalam sains, layaknya memberi perintah yang kau pikir akan diabaikan dalam bidang politik, atau memohon sesuatu yang kau rasa tak 'kan dikabulkan Tuhan dalam agama

العبيد يميلون إلى تعلم الرغبات التي نبذها سادتهم

The question what presuppositions underlie the 'physics' or natural science of a certain people at a certain time is a purely historical question as what kind of clothes they wear. And this is the question that metaphysicians have to answer.