Desperate Quote by Ernest Becker

“Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.”

Ernest Becker

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.3 out of 5 (9 ratings)

Desperate Instruments Life Lying Strive Trying Undoing Whole Whole life

More by Ernest Becker

“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 food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet…

Ernest Becker

“the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.”

Ernest Becker

Image

“When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what…

Ernest Becker

Image

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

Ernest Becker

Image

“neurosis as a problem of character and have seen that it can be approached in two ways: as a problem of too much narrowness…

Ernest Becker

Image

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand…

Ernest Becker

Image

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough…

Ernest Becker

Image

“This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard morality will be…

Ernest Becker

Image

“Civilized" society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this…

Ernest Becker

Image

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…

Ernest Becker

Image

“Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modern man’s moral dependence on another was a result of the…

Ernest Becker

Image

“The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.”

Ernest Becker

Image

Explore all 95 Ernest Becker quotes

More Desperate quotes

Marriage is a desperate thing.

John Selden

Image

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from…

Peter Shaffer

You mostly know that you want to be funny, know that you have the desire. It's not like people who grow up beautiful and…

Tina Fey

Image

I had to smile when stories emerged questioning whether I was gay. Obviously I knew I wasn't but people were curiously desperate to suggest…

Daniel Radcliffe

Image

The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients…

Pauline Hanson

Image

There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the…

Toni Morrison

I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're…

Patrick Marber

Image

Along with a livable wage, many parents are desperate for quality affordable child care.

Kirsten Gillibrand

Image

I think mortality makes you live a fuller existence. When I was a kid I was scared of death, and maybe that's what made…

Dolph Lundgren

Image

It has been hard to muster the resources to support fledgling democracies and to intervene on behalf of the most desperate. The AIDS orphans in Uganda, the refugee fleeing Zimbabwe, the young woman who has been trafficked into the sex trade in Southeast Asia. It has been hard, yet this assistance together with the compassionate work of private charities, people…

Condoleezza Rice

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings…

Marshall McLuhan

If you're going to run for president as the anti-Clinton, you should know that Democrats and their media friends will do whatever it takes to make you look Clintonian. The questions won't go away because Democrats are desperate to define Republican deviancy down to Clinton levels. The ugliness is just getting started.

Paul Gigot

Browse all 1,267 Desperate quotes

Desperate Quote by Ernest Becker

Related quotes

More by Ernest Becker

More Desperate quotes