Josiah Royce Quotes

Eventually, we all end up alone.

We live as we dream - alone.

My personality doesn't interest me.

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

I learned to basically pull my own weight, just do my own thing. I spent a lot of time alone and I loved it. It was actually really great because to the present day I love spending time alone. I go bicycling alone, go climbing alone and I just love being with myself and observing myself and learning something.

I know what works for me.

Your absence has not taught me how to be alone, it merely has shown that when together we cast a single shadow on the wall

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

Why do you want to read others' books when there is the book of yourself?

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Self knowledge puts us on our knees, and it is very necessary for love. For knowledge of God gives love, and knowledge of self gives humility

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and - in spite of True Romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.

Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.