The physician and the philosopher have different ways of defining the diseases of the soul. For instance anger for the philosopher is a sentiment born of the desire to return an offense, whereas for the physician it is a surging of blood around the heart.

The disease of philosophy. - Philosophy is itself the disease for which it pretends to be the cure: the wise man does not pursue wisdom but lives his life, and therein precisely does his wisdom lie.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

"The Philosopher, too, says of the wicked (Ethic. ix, 4) that "their soul is divided against itself . . . one part pulls this way, another that"; and afterwards he concludes, saying: "If wickedness makes a man so miserable, he should strain every nerve to avoid vice.

The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.

The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.

The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.

No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could. ...the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic.

Philosophy can make people sick.

The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.

What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.

Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought.

Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.