Quotes from Josiah Royce

Unless you can find some sort of LOYALTY, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.

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

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.

Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Ideas any one can mould as he wishes.

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.

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

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

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.

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.

Unless you can find some sort of loyalty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.

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.

Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity.

and to be in charge of life is always an occasion for loyalty.