A Quote by Anton Chekhov

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

Anton Chekhov

Quote Topics

Academia Difficult Easy Life Philosopher Very

Quote Author

Anton Chekhov
Russian - Dramatist
January 29, 1860 - July 15, 1904

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

Bertrand Russell

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Wallace Stevens

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

George Bernard Shaw

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

Louis Althusser

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

Alain de Botton

A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

Hu Shih

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

Criss Jami

Men may be very learned, and yet very miserable; it is easy to be a deep geometrician, or a sublime astronomer, but very difficult to be a good man. I esteem, therefore, the traveller who instructs the heart, but despise him who only indulges the imagination. A man who leaves home to mend himself and others, is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is only a vagabond.