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

Ernest Becker Quotes #9060
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #17404
#3. To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #18221
#4. Love is the problem of an animal ...

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #26167
#5. To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #200733
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #241967
#7. Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #289197
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #302372
#9. The road to creativity passes ...

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #310727
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #316464
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #321292
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #334408
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #334912
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #435454
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #461610
#16. Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #467971
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #487485
#18. Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #538248
#19. Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #553780
#20. The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #606982
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #630242
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #654109
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #660057
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #792469
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #794786
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #847151
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #893015
#28. The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #918827
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1006988
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1016794
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1040679
#32. Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1040906
#33. Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1062571
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1079383
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1081798
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1104634
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1108087
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1112447
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1151818
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1167412
#41. The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1180707
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1191506
#43. Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1239980
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1248522
#45. Horror alone brings peace of mind.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1267280
#46. The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1278573
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1291760
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1307848
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1310216
#50. What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1311233
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1314202
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1357568
#53. People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1372417
#54. Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1410383
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1416631
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1429049
#57. All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1435989
#58. The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1503863
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1524942
#60. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1535499
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1548706
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1569389
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1618968
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1620106
#65. We are gods with anuses.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1624372
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1629770
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1643982
#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

Ernest Becker Quotes #1673651
#69. The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1770074
#70. Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1832116
#71. Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1839761
#72. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker Quotes #1869017

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top