Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility. — Ernest Becker Burden Copy Share Image
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death. — Ernest Becker Death Copy Share Image
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death. — Ernest Becker Community Copy Share Image
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship. — Ernest Becker Devastation Copy Share Image
“the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.” — Ernest Becker Communication 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
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
“to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.” — Ernest Becker Hero Copy Share Image
“From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is… — Ernest Becker Birth Copy Share Image
Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own… — Ernest Becker Animal Copy Share Image
It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never… — Ernest Becker Doom Copy Share Image
One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels… — Ernest Becker 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 Animals 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
...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
“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
“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
The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something… — Ernest Becker 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 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 Copy Share Image
“doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical… — Ernest Becker Hero Copy Share Image
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not… — Ernest Becker Accusation Copy Share Image
“If the frustrations are not surrounded by anxiety, fear of life, insecure love and support, then the child progresses easily and naturally… — Ernest Becker Autistic Copy Share Image
“And so, beginning with the small early frustrations and deprivations, the child is helped to govern himself. his ego develops by learning… — Ernest Becker Children 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 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
“Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to… — Ernest Becker Possibility Copy Share Image
“If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become the Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one… — Ernest Becker Good and bad Copy Share Image
“modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength.” — Ernest Becker Disillusionment Copy Share Image
To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once… — Ernest Becker Copy Share Image
Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem. — Ernest Becker Contradiction Copy Share Image
“neurosis as a problem of character and have seen that it can be approached in two ways: as a problem of too… — Ernest Becker Neurosis Copy Share Image
“one of the great dangers of life is too much possibility, and that the place where we find people who have succumbed… — Ernest Becker Danger Copy Share Image
“The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.” — Ernest Becker Aspiration Copy Share Image
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. — Ernest Becker Awareness Copy Share Image
War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or… — Ernest Becker Class Copy Share Image
Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil. — Ernest Becker Copy Share Image
If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish… — Ernest Becker Copy Share Image
“Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.” — Ernest Becker Modern man Copy Share Image
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates… — Ernest Becker Art Copy Share Image
![“If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become the Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes bound to the object in dependency. One needs it for self-justification. . . . [O]ne's self-development is restricted by the object, absorbed by it. It is too narrow a…” quote by Ernest Becker](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/bca/ernest-becker-7036_lose-yourself_if-the-partner-becomes-god-he-can-just-a_336762.jpg)
