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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

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
Results
Life
Unlived
Unused
Guilt

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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.
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Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
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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.
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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
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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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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.
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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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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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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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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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.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
Ernest Becker
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We are gods with anuses.
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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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker