"Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it." The words of Reinhold Niebuhr provide the title and set the tone for what is a wryly humorous look at some of the great philosophical pronouncements on how life ought to be lived.

Fifty years ago Daniel Klein embarked on the study of philosophy at Harvard, where he began gathering wise words from the world's greatest thinkers. Now in his seventies, he revisits these pronouncements with characteristic warmth, charm and wonderfully dry sense of humour. Distilling the wonders of our greatest thinkers, from Epicurus and Nietzsche, all the way to Samuel Beckett, Klein is enlightening and never dull. This is a pithy and eminently readable meditation on one of the most profound subjects there is.