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All history is art, because to tell a story is art, whereas to tell a true story is history: thus history is art, but a specification of art, art qualified by a condition (truth) which deprives it of a part of its character but not of all.

— R. G. Collingwood R. G. Collingwood (1925)

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More quotes by R. 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.

Speculum Mentis (1924)

Science is finding things out; and in that sense history is science.

The Idea of History (1946)

The ideal and the real are not mutually exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real.

Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution (1925)

In actual history, events overlap ; you cannot, except by a confessed fiction, state the point at which the event called the Middle Ages ends and the event called the Modern Period begins.

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

The Idea of History (1946)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: R. G. Collingwood (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.