Josiah Royce Quotes on Life
Josiah Royce was an American philosopher and the principal American defender of objective idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This page collects quotes attributed to Josiah Royce on the topic of life, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“We become individuals through our loyalties.”
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“No one finds himself simply by trying to be himself.”
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“We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody.”
Lecture on Hegel -
“Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience….”
Royce 1908 Near the end of The Philosophy of Loyalty