Top 72 Ernest Becker Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it.
Ernest Becker
#3. To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
Ernest Becker
#5. To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.
Ernest Becker
#6. We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation ... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.
Ernest Becker
#7. Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Ernest Becker
#8. Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life.
Ernest Becker
#10. Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
Ernest Becker
#11. If a thinker throws off too many unsystematic and rich insights, there is no place to grab onto his thought. The thing he is trying to illuminate seems as elusive as before.
Ernest Becker
#12. 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
#13. From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. - LEO TOLSTOI
Ernest Becker
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
Ernest Becker
#17. The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.
Ernest Becker
#18. Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker
#19. Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.
Ernest Becker
#20. The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Ernest Becker
#21. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat atheistic communism.
Ernest Becker
#22. 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
#23. In Christendom he too is a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; he dies; the parson introduces him into eternity for the price of $10 - but a self he was not, and a self he did not become ... .
Ernest Becker
#24. 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
#25. In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
Ernest Becker
#26. If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.
Ernest Becker
#27. Man is naturally humble, naturally grateful, naturally guilty, naturally transcended, naturally a sufferer; he is small, pitiful, weak, a passive taker who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power.
Ernest Becker
#28. The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.
Ernest Becker
#29. 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
#30. Even if men admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. There is no "harmonious development," no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from men their need for a "beyond" on which to base the meaning of their lives.
Ernest Becker
#31. The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
Ernest Becker
#32. Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker
#33. Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.
Ernest Becker
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active work project
Ernest Becker
#37. Civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible,
Ernest Becker
#38. Man must always imagine and believe in a "second" reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.
Ernest Becker
#39. [Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.
Ernest Becker
#40. Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so to the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation.
Ernest Becker
#41. The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.
Ernest Becker
#42. There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.
Ernest Becker
#43. Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
#44. The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.
Ernest Becker
#46. The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.
Ernest Becker
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
Ernest Becker
#50. What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
Ernest Becker
#51. I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith - no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone. - OMAR KHAYYAM
Ernest Becker
#52. 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
#53. People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker
#54. Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Ernest Becker
#55. 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
#56. The urge to immortality is not a simple reflex of the death-anxiety but a reaching out by one's whole being toward life. Perhaps this natural expansion of the creature alone can explain why transference is such a universal passion.
Ernest Becker
#57. All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest Becker
#58. The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Ernest Becker
#59. The important conclusion for us is that the groups "use" the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges.
Ernest Becker
#60. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.
Ernest Becker
#61. Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.
Ernest Becker
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
Ernest Becker
#66. War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
Ernest Becker
#67. People were always ready to yield their
wills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chance
for developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the great
nineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky
Ernest Becker
#68. If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.
Ernest Becker
#69. The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.
Ernest Becker
#70. Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all.
Ernest Becker
#71. Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
Ernest Becker
#72. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker
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