Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Order
Live
Need
Needs
Dooms
Really
Fateful
Never
Doom
Life
Ironic
Lying

More quotes by Ernest Becker

Image
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest Becker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker
Image
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker
Image
Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
Ernest Becker
Image
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
Image
To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
Ernest Becker
Image
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker
Image
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
Image
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Ernest Becker
Image
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker
Image
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
Image
We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker