Robin George Collingwood

“All history is the history of thought.”

“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.”

“Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

“The historian's business is to re-enact the past in his own mind.”

“Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.”

“The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which is in some sense still living in the present.”

“The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”

“Civilization is the process of reducing the element of force in human affairs.”

“Art is the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.”

“To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his own mind.”

“The work of the artist is to express emotions; and the only emotions he can express are those which he feels.”

“Metaphysics is the science of the absolute presuppositions of ordinary and scientific thinking.”

“History, in the proper sense of the word, is the history of human affairs.”