Top 35 Josiah Royce Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Josiah Royce

2. “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

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

— Josiah Royce

4. “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

5. “Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.”

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

7. “Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and mysterious object of the biographer’s interest, of the historian’s comments, of popular legend, and of patriotic devotion.”

— Josiah Royce

8. “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

9. “The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest.”

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

11. “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

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

— Josiah Royce

13. “If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as thehistory of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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.”

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

23. “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

24. “A crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic is not a community. It has a mind, but no institutions, no organizations, no coherent unity, no history, no traditions.”

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Josiah Royce

29. “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

30. “Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity.”

— Josiah Royce

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”

— Josiah Royce

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

— Josiah Royce

35. “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