Josiah Royce's Quotes

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

Ideas any one can mould as he wishes.

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.

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

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

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

Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will.

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

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

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

As for you, my beloved friend, I loyally believe in your uniqueness; but whenever I try to tell to you wherein it consists, I helplessly describe only a type.

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.

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 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.

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.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

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.

No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already.

Our will makes constantly a sort of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will continually show some respect to the will, the will shall consent to be strenuous in its industry.

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.