Josiah Royce > Quotes

“Unless you can find some sort of loyalty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.”
― Josiah Royce

“Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.”
― Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity

“Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity.”
― Josiah Royce, The philosophy of loyalty

“If I ever say, “I have undone that deed,” I shall be both a fool and a liar. Counsel me, if you will, to forget that deed. Counsel me to do good deeds without number to set over against that treason. Counsel me to be cheerful . . . Counsel me to plunge into Lethe. All such counsel may be, in its way and time, good. Only do not counsel me “to get rid of” just that sin. That, so far as the real facts are concerned, cannot be done. For I am, and to the end of endless time shall remain, the doer of that wilfully traitorous deed. Whatever other value I may get, that value I retain forever. My guilt is as enduring as time.”
― Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity

“and to be in charge of life is always an occasion for loyalty.”
― Josiah Royce, The philosophy of loyalty

“For by nature I am a sort of meeting place of countless streams of ancestral tendency.”
― Josiah Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty

“It is propitious and gratifying that Fordham University Press has decided to reissue these two volumes of The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce. When first published, in 1969, reviewers and commentators were taken with both the sweep and the depth of Royce’s thought.”
― Josiah Royce, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, Volume II: Logic, Loyalty, and Community

“My duty is simply my own will brought to my clear self-consciousness. That which I can rightly view as good for me is simply the object of my own deepest desire set plainly before my insight.”
― Josiah Royce, The philosophy of loyalty

“Kant is no optimist, just as he is no sentimentalist, about the world of experience. The divine justice does n't very ob viously show itself here below. Kant sees much evil all about him ; condemns, in one passage, the people who find our present life happy; declares that not one of us would willingly lead his own life over again, if he had the free choice and were not bound by some sort of duty to do so; in short, speaks almost cynically of those earthly joys whereof, with all his cheeriness and his open-heartedness, he tasted so little.”
― Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Letters

“Would you then get on the witness stand in a court of law and swear to tell ‘the expedient, the whole expedient and nothing but the expedient, so help me future experience’…?”
― Josiah Royce