Ernest Becker - Live 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 creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of experience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" creativity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.

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