Josiah Royce Quotations

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

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

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

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.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

The world is a progressively realized community of interpretation.

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

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

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.

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