Ernest Becker Quotes

41 quotes in 709 categories

• When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even…
• Love is the problem of an animal...
• For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed…
• Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
• Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.
• To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
• The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life…
• Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
• What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to…
• the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
• Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
• We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others…
• We are gods with anuses.
• 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…
• The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that…
• The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
• The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die.…
• Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
• Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be…
• ...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give…

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