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Who said: “Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed.”
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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index C > R. G. Collingwood Quotes

R. G. Collingwood
(22 Feb 1889 - 9 Jan 1943)

English historian and philosopher who placed emphasis on the role of history in philosophy. He was an authority on Roman occupation of England.

Science Quotes by R. G. Collingwood (5 quotes)

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.
— R. G. Collingwood
The New Leviathan: or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (1942, 1999) Pt. 1, Ch. 1, Aph. 46, 3.
Science quotes on:  |  Become (821)  |  Beginner (11)  |  Cease (81)  |  Cessation (13)  |  Learn (672)  |  Learned (235)  |  Learning (291)  |  Life (1870)  |  Man (2252)  |  Master (182)

Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge; assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force.
— R. G. Collingwood
In Speculum Mentis (1924).
Science quotes on:  |  Behind (139)  |  Driving (28)  |  Edge (51)  |  Force (497)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Weight (140)

The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.
— R. G. Collingwood
'Outlines of a Philosophy of Art,' Essays in the Philosophy of Art, Indiana University Press (1964).
Science quotes on:  |  Absolutely (41)  |  Aim (175)  |  Antithetical (2)  |  Appearance (145)  |  Apprehend (5)  |  Change (639)  |  Contingent (12)  |  Independently (24)  |  Indicate (62)  |  Intelligible (35)  |  Move (223)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Object (438)  |  Purely (111)  |  Sense (785)  |  Sensible (28)  |  Somehow (48)  |  Spaceless (2)  |  Symbolize (8)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Thought (995)  |  Timeless (8)  |  Universal (198)  |  World (1850)

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.
— R. G. Collingwood
The Idea of History (1946), 224.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Certain (557)  |  Condition (362)  |  Historical (70)  |  History (716)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Nature (71)  |  Law (913)  |  Life (1870)  |  Mental (179)  |  Mistake (180)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Permanent (67)  |  Person (366)  |  Positive (98)  |  Possible (560)  |  Psychology (166)  |  Regard (312)  |  Rising (44)  |  Sphere (118)  |  Transient (13)

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.
— R. G. Collingwood
The Idea of History (1946), 214.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Contemplation (75)  |  Discern (35)  |  Event (222)  |  Historian (59)  |  History (716)  |  Intelligent (108)  |  Look (584)  |  Merely (315)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Never (1089)  |  Observation (593)  |  Phenomenon (334)  |  Present (630)  |  Reality (274)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Sense (785)  |  Spectacle (35)  |  Spectacles (10)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thought (995)  |  Through (846)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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