Daniel Klein > Quotes

“When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, 'When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everthing else in marriage is transitory.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“Companionship was at the top of Epicurus's list of life's pleasures. He wrote, 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but everything that happens happens for no real reason.”
― Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

“With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting. Enter boredom. A bored man even longs for longing. He has time to fill, but there is nothing compelling to do.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and
announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got good news and
I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The
bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”
― Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

“This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.”
― Daniel Klein

“Loving and being loved affirmed one's sense of self and conquered feelings of loneliness and alienation. It kept one sane.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“I am not looking for a thing; I am searching for a spiritual experience.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“Everydayness” is a key concept in Existentialism. It describes the way we get so immersed in the routines and roles of our daily lives that we never experience full consciousness of who we are and what choices are available to us.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“One thing that struck me as I went over my collection of aphorisms and quotes is how often the paramount value of fully engaging in the present crops up and the various routes different philosophers take to arrive at this value. Epicurus makes it a centerpiece of his philosophy by counseling us to cease from always wanting something more than or different from what we have right now. Marcus Aurelius hits this idea even more forcefully by advising us to act as if every action were our last. Millennia later, Henry David Thoreau articulates it with both simplicity and passion in his admonition to “launch yourself on every wave.” And the idea is catapulted into the transcendental realm in Wittgenstein’s breathtaking declaration, “[E]ternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“I wonder if I have a problem. I definitely have a tendency to seek spiritual inspiration from super-rational thinkers rather than from rabbis and priests and theologians.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“When the German twentieth-century playwright Bertolt Brecht was asked what he thought of ethics, he replied, “First grub, then ethics.” He was implying that ethical decision-making may only be a luxury reserved for those of us who do not need to struggle simply to stay alive.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“We slough off the responsibility to create ourselves by shrugging and claiming, “That’s just the way I am.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“When all is said and done, this Existentialist precept resonates with me more than any other philosophy of life I know. The idea that life’s meaning is not something to look for but something to create myself feels right to me. In fact, it seems absolutely essential.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom from the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“Oscar Wilde: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“I still take great pleasure in playing around with philosophical questions, the ones that [Bertrand] Russell is the first to admit have no unequivocal answers. . . . I guess this quality makes me a Cerebral Hedonist, although some would say it makes me a mental masochist.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“there is no rest for the striver. Just beyond the completion of each goal on our life-achievement “bucket list” looms another goal, and then another. Meanwhile, of course, the clock is ticking—quite loudly, in fact. We become breathless. And we have no time left for a calm and reflective appreciation of our twilight years, no deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends or listening to music or musing about the story of our lives. And we will never get another chance for that.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“Socrates: Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher? Glaucon: I do not apprehend your meaning. S: The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the dog, and is remarkable in the animal. G: What trait? S: Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good. Did this never strike you as curious? G: The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognize the truth of your remark. S: And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming; —your dog is a true philosopher. G: Why? S: Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing. And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance? G: Most assuredly. S: And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“Epicurus said something similar when he wrote, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“read”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus, in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life.”
― Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life

“If all you seek from something is pleasure, you’ll never find it. All you will feel is noia [existential boredom], often disgust. To feel pleasure in any act or activity, you have to pursue some end other than pleasure.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“Ad hominem: An abbreviation for argumentum ad hominem, meaning an argument against an idea or statement based on the character of the person who authored it. It is sometimes used to discredit a philosophy of life proclaimed by someone who does not live up to it himself, as in, “He talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk, so I’m not listening to his advice.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“little world”: “The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate, and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“A man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live

“But the main reason we keep ducking the responsibility of self-creation is that it is super scary. If I am the master of my fate and my fate does not turn out so well, I have no one to blame but myself.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

“Huxley not only anticipated the liberated consciousness of the 1960s he was also a major player in its creation. It was that consciousness that gave birth to the Sexual Revolution. Annulling the strictures of church and state, newly liberated folks decided that sex need not entail either sin or guilt. Lust was just plain fun, so go for it. And go for it we did in that era, right up until some of us started to sense that sex as simply a pleasurable sport did have some drawbacks. Hearts still got broken. Mutual trust became more complicated. “Open marriages” didn’t last. And a sense of isolation and loneliness descended on some of us as the concept of love became more elusive than ever. Much to our disappointment, sexual liberation turned out to come with a price tag. Even the great prophet Huxley had not forecast that.”
― Daniel Klein, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It