“Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.” — Ernest Becker Animal Copy Share Image
“every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….” — Ernest Becker Freedom Copy Share Image
“the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.” — Ernest Becker Madness Copy Share Image
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. — Ernest Becker Creativity Copy Share Image
What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. — Ernest Becker Extinction Copy Share Image
To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything. — Ernest Becker Awareness Copy Share Image
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith — Ernest Becker Analysis Copy Share Image
Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing. — Ernest Becker Desperate Copy Share Image
The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction… — Ernest Becker Burden Copy Share Image
“The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to… — Ernest Becker Love Copy Share Image
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. — Ernest Becker Endure Copy Share Image
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know… — Ernest Becker Animal Copy Share Image
“the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.” — Ernest Becker Essence Copy Share Image
“never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding.” — Ernest Becker Knowledge Copy Share Image
“Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know… — Ernest Becker Natural world Copy Share Image
“I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still… — Ernest Becker Ambitious Copy Share Image
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that… — Ernest Becker Body Copy Share Image
The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday… — Ernest Becker Animal Copy Share Image
What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one… — Ernest Becker Compelling Copy Share Image
“Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modern man’s moral dependence on another was a result… — Ernest Becker Freud Copy Share Image
The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something… — Ernest Becker Common Copy Share Image
“freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up… — Ernest Becker Dangerous Copy Share Image
I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done… — Ernest Becker Creation Copy Share Image
“We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we… — Ernest Becker Art Copy Share Image
“Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping,… — Ernest Becker Body Copy Share Image
“Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns… — Ernest Becker Character Copy Share Image
“Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his… — Ernest Becker Art Copy Share Image
“The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a… — Ernest Becker Absurdity Copy Share Image
We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the… — Ernest Becker Anxious Copy Share Image
“When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version… — Ernest Becker Admire Copy Share Image
“Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.” — Ernest Becker Bitch Copy Share Image
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals. — Ernest Becker Existential Copy Share Image
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves — Ernest Becker Create Copy Share Image
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt. — Ernest Becker Guilt Copy Share Image
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship. — Ernest Becker Devastation Copy Share Image
