Ernest Becker - Life Quotes

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To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this... is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.

Ernest Becker
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 itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

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 essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

Ernest Becker
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 experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.

Ernest Becker
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 follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

Ernest Becker
It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

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