Quote

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

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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
Health
Justify
Take
Ideal
Enough
Honest
Mental
Mean
Lying
Ideals
Life
Lives
Illusion
Death
Kill
Existential
Others
Lived
Commandments
Reality
Follow
Compelling
Doe

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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
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The manager asks how and when the leader asks what and why - Warren Bennis, Leadership Guru It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief
Ernest Becker
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker
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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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We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker
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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
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
Ernest Becker
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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
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Ernest Becker
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
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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
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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
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We might say that both the artist and theneurotic 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
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Ernest Becker
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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
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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
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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
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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
Ernest Becker