All Things Shining Quotes

“Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves.”
― Hubert L. Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Hubert L. Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“To say that all men need the gods therefore is to say, in part at least, that we are the kinds of beings who are at our best when we find ourselves acting in ways that we cannot - and ought not - entirely take credit for.”
― Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Canon to Find Meaning in a Secular World

“It is an echo, in fact, from the last lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the lines in which Dante describes what it is to feel ecstatic bliss in the mystical union with God, to give up your entire identity and subsume it beneath the sacred power of God’s divine love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
― Hubert L. Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“A reconfiguring work that opens a new world would have to have a threefold structure.

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Finally, the work of the reconfigurer would be so radical that people could not understand what it called them to do. People would need an articulator—something or someone that made sense of what the reconfigurer was up to and spelled it out as a paradigm incarnating their new world.”
― Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.76
If you tried to listen to all the sounds of the universe at once it would be deafening. All the various meanings would cancel each other out. You would hear the chaos of white noise instead of the single, hidden truth of a rational universe. This is exactly parallel to what would happen if you tried to see all the colors in the world at once. It would look like something that has a meaning, you would be driven to find out what that ultimate meaning was, but you would be driven mad in the search. Because when it is universal it is deafening, it is a chaos; and although this chaos is itself the ultimate nature of the universe, you can only fathom it from one perspective at a time.
That is why, on Melville’s account, Ahab’s fanaticism is ultimately mad. The multiple meanings of the universe simply don’t add up[…]”

Excerpt From: Hubert Dreyfus. “All Things Shining.”
― Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Canon to Find Meaning in a Secular World

“I let you find all those polytheistic truths yourself; life in them, find the joy in them, and even sorrow. But in these joys and sorrows rest content with the thought that they give meaning to our world.”
― Hubert L. Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age