Josiah Royce Quotes
Unless you can find some sort of LOYALTY, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.
Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.
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.
Loyalty is a good for the loyal man; but it may be mischievous for those whom his cause assails.
Memory and hope constantly incite us to the extensions of the self which play so large a part in our daily life.
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.
Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will.
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.
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.
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.
God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life.
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.
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.
By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.
I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.
So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique.
For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.
So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.
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.
Men accept without questioning that this world is real and important and worthwhile. This is faith. Philosophy is the ongoing questioning of this faith.
Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us.
Religious faith indeed relates to that which is above us but it must arise from that which is within us.
Unless you can find some sort of loyalty you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.
