Ernest Becker Short Quotes

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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.

Ernest Becker
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves

Ernest Becker
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

Ernest Becker
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

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

Ernest Becker
What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

Ernest Becker
Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

Ernest Becker
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Ernest Becker
The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

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
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.

Ernest Becker
Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

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
One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

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.

Ernest Becker
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

Ernest Becker
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 cannot be consumed.

Ernest Becker
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
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 pretending not to be mad.

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