You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct. – Madame Gout to Mr. Benjamin Franklin, “Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,”

My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. – Louisa May Alcott, in Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. E.D. Cheney, 1889