Ernest Becker - The Denial of Death

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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 if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem

Ernest Becker
If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.

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

Ernest Becker
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 majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

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

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

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
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves

Ernest Becker
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

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 real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe. immortal in some ways

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

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

Ernest Becker
I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.

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

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 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
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
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