Quotes by Ernest Becker

“People were always ready to yield theirwills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chancefor developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the greatnineteenth-century Russi...”

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

“We are gods with anuses.”

“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 b...”

“Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awarness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awarness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer pro...”

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

“Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoningof the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrainedmaterial production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasiveevi...”

“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 ...”

“Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In t...”

“Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.”

“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.”

“[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 ma...”

“Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.”

“Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effaceme...”

“Try repeating man is an animal" a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds. There seems to be no way to get this idea into our heads, except by long rumination over the facts of evoluti...”

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

“And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it....”

“In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature...”

“Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order tolive at all.”

“In this view, man is an energy-convertingorganism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature ...”