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Men Quotes by Ernest Becker
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die.…
- ...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…
- Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering…
More Men Quotes
- Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. — Hannah Arendt
- The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are… — Hannah Arendt
- Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in… — Hannah Arendt
- Flattery and deceit are the darlings of great men, and so with these men spread the butter on thick, if you want… — Pietro Aretino
- I am a free man. I do not need to copy Petrarca or Boccaccio. My own genius is enough. Let others worry… — Pietro Aretino
- Let each man exercise the art he knows. — Aristophanes
- A man's homeland is wherever he prospers. — Aristophanes
- Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of… — Aristophanes