Josiah Royce Quotes

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Reality is mind-made.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

I think Pirandello had something to say to people about what truth really is.

There are some things that are real, that you can see, that you can observe, like the moon, and grass and things. But for ideas to become real, they have to be played on your senses.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

The material universe exists only in the mind.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

The thought is not the thing.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

We live in condensations of our imagination

To be is to be perceived

All you see in your world is the outcome of your idea about it.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

In every story of solipsism, there is always a conspiracy. Why? Because there is always a background involved in every perception.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.