Josiah Royce

Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us.

— Josiah Royce

But you are alone. Yet I never tell what you are. And if your face lights up my world as no other…

— Josiah Royce

A crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic is not a community. It has…

— Josiah Royce

Ideas any one can mould as he wishes.

— Josiah Royce

As for you, my beloved friend, I loyally believe in your uniqueness; but whenever I try to tell to you wherein it…

— Josiah Royce

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I…

— Josiah Royce

The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but…

— Josiah Royce

Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally…

— Josiah Royce

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is…

— Josiah Royce

If I look to see what I ever did that, for all I now know, some other man might not have done,…

— Josiah Royce

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

— 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

And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness all our lives win in our union with him the individuality…

— Josiah Royce

I never felt a feeling that I knew or could know to be unlike the feelings of other people. I never consciously…

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely…

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its…

— Josiah Royce

A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time…

— Josiah Royce

Our will makes constantly a sort of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will continually show some respect to the…

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce