Daniel Handler Quotes

The best lesson I was given is that all of life teaches, especially if we have that expectation.

I learned about life from life itself, love I learned in a single kiss and could teach no one anything except that I have lived with something in common among men.

I certainly didn't learn anything in school. My education was the world.

It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.

Your debut record, in terms of lyrical content, can be about the last couple of years of your life obviously, but your first record into the world is also about everything else that you've ever experienced in your life until that moment.

Apart from Love, which is not a human emotion, of all the rest my last words would best read: It's all for the experience.

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained

As I continue to mature and navigate the world, there are so many myths that are dispelled for me.

Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

I believe that this world was set about for us to enjoy and to love and to experience and to have it all be, to a certain extent, unpredictable. Ever since I was a child I have believed that my life has been guided.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

I've been through a lot in life, and had some ups and downs. It's what's led me to this day.

Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation.

In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.

Although wisdom is built on life experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.

Life is not a song, sweetling. Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow.

Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted.

Welcome. Come on in to me world.

Proximity is power. If you can get proximity with people that are the best in the world, things can happen because all of the people they know, the insights they have and the life experience they have. They can save you a decade of time by one insight.

I honestly try to have the approach that this is real life, this is the real world that we live in, and I don't really try to shelter [my son] from a lot of things that he's gonna see when he looks out of the window.

My ability to adapt has always stood out. I've been immersed in many worlds and have had the influence of many things in my upbringing so I'm familiar with so many styles of living, so many characters, so many life paths and its just easy to simulate for me.