William Ernest Hocking Quotes

The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote.

We cannot swing up a rope that is attached only to our own belt.

And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life.

Mr. Rihani, we met once a thousand years ago and we may not meet again for another thousand years.

We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?

A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will
in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains
nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt.

Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.

Art is life, plus caprice.

What our view of the effectiveness of religion in history does at once make evident as to its nature is
first, its necessary distinction; second, its necessary supremacy. These characters though external have been so essential to its fruitfulness, as to justify the statement that without them religion is not religion. A merged religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no religion.

Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.

I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work.

Principle III:;: Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.

This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them
placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be.

No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.

It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right.

However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,
i.e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.