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
Live
Spring
Springs
Human
Accept
Inability
Humans
Creativity
Extra
Denials
Real
Accepting
Extras
Standardized
Long
Almost
Denial
Brink
Kind
Known
Cultural
Schizophrenic
Men
Nature
Madness
Continuum
People
Ends
Price
Exes

More quotes by 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.
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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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.
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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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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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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.
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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.
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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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.
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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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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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It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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