Irving Babbitt Quotes

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The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

Irving Babbitt
If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.

Irving Babbitt
The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.

Irving Babbitt
The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.

Irving Babbitt
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

Irving Babbitt
Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: "I am an Epicurean."

Irving Babbitt
Man would not succumb so easily to flattery if he did not begin by flattering himself.

Irving Babbitt
When the element of conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life, what remains is the irresponsible quest for thrills.

Irving Babbitt
Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of it, are wont nowadays to call themselves idealists. We should at least recognize that ideals in this sense are not the same as standards and that they are often indeed the opposite of standards. It would be easy to mention institutions of learning in this country that are at present engaged in breaking down standards in the name of ideals.

Irving Babbitt
The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

Irving Babbitt
Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.

Irving Babbitt
The true dualism I take to be the contrast between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and the other as vital control (frein vital).

Irving Babbitt
The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

Irving Babbitt
If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

Irving Babbitt
Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

Irving Babbitt
To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.

Irving Babbitt
Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.

Irving Babbitt
Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything including the irresponsible quest of thrills; so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama.

Irving Babbitt
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

Irving Babbitt
Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.

Irving Babbitt
Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.

Irving Babbitt
If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

Irving Babbitt
As a matter of fact one hears it commonly said nowadays that literature may be rescued from the philologist on the one hand and the mere dilettante on the other by an increase of emphasis on its intellectual content, that the teaching of literature, if it is to have virility, must be above all the teaching of ideas.

Irving Babbitt
True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard.

Irving Babbitt
The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas.

Irving Babbitt
This higher will is felt in its relation to the impressions and impulses and expansive desires of the natural man as a will to refrain.... The failure to exercise the will to refrain in some form or degree means spiritual anarchy. A combination such as we are getting more and more at present of spiritual anarchy with an ever-increasing material efficiency—power without wisdom, as one is tempted to put it—is not likely to work either for the happiness of the individual or for the welfare of society.

Irving Babbitt
The complaint is often heard at present that there is an increasing exodus from the difficult and disciplinary subjects and a rush into the soft subjects. One good sign is that those who stand for the difficult and disciplinary subjects, e. g., the professors of physics and the professors of the ancient classics, are coming more and more to see that they must co-operate and not work at cross-purposes, as they have done only too often in the past, if they are to make head against the drift toward softness.

Irving Babbitt
I chanced recently to be glancing over … a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships, and that shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow indeed very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill.

Irving Babbitt
What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.

Irving Babbitt
To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image.

Irving Babbitt