“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

“Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #54
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one." by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel?

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel photo

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel 67

German poet, critic and scholar 1772–1829

Related quotes

“I cannot allow or encourage anyone to become a philosopher. But once you find the inspiration to become one of them, there will be no one to stop you.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Tears and Saints (1937)

“After the deed is done, one always becomes clever and philosophical.”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To Leon Goldensohn, March 16, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004 - Page 29

“Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 173

“Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (pp. 125-126)

“I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

387.
On Certainty (1969)

“And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.”

Alexander McCall Smith book The Careful Use of Compliments

The Careful Use of Compliments, chapter 2.
The Sunday Philosophy Club series

“David D. Friedman is the one of the most important living anarcho-capitalist philosophers. He has added a philosopher's insistence on consistency to the firm grasp of economic principles he presumably learned at the paternal knees.”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

In The Pragmatist. (1998), Vol.14, p. 77
About

“He was one of most qualified person academically; he was a freedom fighter; a thinker, philosopher, a politician, and above all a jurist of great eminence.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, P.201.

Related topics