Robin G. Collingwood Men Quotations

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.

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

What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.

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.

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.

Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do.