Quote

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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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Long
Almost
Denial
Brink
Kind
Known
Cultural
Schizophrenic
Men
Nature
Madness
Continuum
People
Ends
Price
Exes
Live
Spring
Springs
Human
Accept
Inability
Humans
Creativity
Extra
Denials
Real
Accepting
Extras
Standardized

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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.
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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
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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.
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker
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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.
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.
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We are gods with anuses.
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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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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
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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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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
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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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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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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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