Quotes from Daniel Klein

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.

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.

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.

Loving and being loved affirmed one's sense of self and conquered feelings of loneliness and alienation. It kept one sane.

I am not looking for a thing ; I am searching for a spiritual experience .

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.

The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create.

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

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.

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.

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.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy." You have to love those words "very miserable"; Schopenhauer could not be content with simply saying "unhappy" as Epicurus did.

We slough off the responsibility to create ourselves by shrugging and claiming, "That's just the way I am.

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.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

According to Sartre, we are historically prone to thinking of ourselves as objects due to the Judeo-Christian credo that God stamped us with our essence from the beginning; it is His prerogative. So to think that we are able to stamp ourselves is a sacrilege.

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.

I now realize that I habitually fight against a leisurely pace; I resist giving in to slowness.

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.

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.

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.