Ernest Becker Quotes

41 quotes in 709 categories

• When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the…
• To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once and for all…
• I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived…
• The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely…
• Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
• People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
• Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
• What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is…
• It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
• The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life…
• We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of…
• The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural…
• We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and…
• The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them…
• Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
• All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
• The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the…
• What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
• If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even…
• Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

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