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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
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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Need
Irony
Must
Condition
Needs
Fully
Men
Anxiety
Awakens
Life
Conditions
Shrink
Alive
Annihilation
Free
Shrinks
Death
Deepest
More quotes by Ernest Becker
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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
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
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
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
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
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. 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
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
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Ernest Becker
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
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
Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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
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
Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
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
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 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
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker
