Quote

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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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Project
Active
Projects
Chews
Artist
Objectified
Back
Chew
Might
Exes
Work
Bite
Way
Bites

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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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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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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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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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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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.
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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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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We are gods with anuses.
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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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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