Josiah Royce quotes

Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning. (Josiah Royce)
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.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
Error is not a mere accident of an untrained intellect, but a necessary stage or feature or moment of the expression of the truth.
Josiah Royce
We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see. (Josiah Royce)
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.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
Ideas any one can mould as he wishes.
Josiah Royce
So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce
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. (Josiah Royce)
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.
Josiah Royce
So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique.
Josiah Royce
The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.
Josiah Royce
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.
Josiah Royce