Josiah Royce Quotes

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

God too longs; and because the Absolute Life itself, which dwells in our life, and inspires these very longings, possesses the true world, and is that world.

I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.

By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.

But you are alone. Yet I never tell what you are. And if your face lights up my world as no other can - well, this feeling too, when viewed as the mere psychologist has to view it, appears to be simply what all the other friends report about their friends.

Ideas any one can mould as he wishes.

For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.

And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning.

Men accept without questioning that this world is real and important and worthwhile. This is faith. Philosophy is the ongoing questioning of this faith.

I never felt a feeling that I knew or could know to be unlike the feelings of other people. I never consciously thought, except after patterns that the world or my fellows set for me.

The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.

God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life.

We seek true individuality and the true individuals. But we find them not. For lo, we mortals see what our poor eyes can see; and they, the true individuals, - they belong not to this world of our merely human sense and thought.

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.

So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique.

That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.

Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.

Loyalty is a good for the loyal man; but it may be mischievous for those whom his cause assails.

No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.

Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.

If I look to see what I ever did that, for all I now know, some other man might not have done, I am utterly unable to discover the certainly unique deed.

Memory and hope constantly incite us to the extensions of the self which play so large a part in our daily life.