Quote

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

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
Insignificance
Extinction
Fears
Much
Really
Men

More quotes by Ernest Becker

Image
The manager asks how and when the leader asks what and why - Warren Bennis, Leadership Guru It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief
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
We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker
Image
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
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
Horror alone brings peace of mind.
Ernest Becker
Image
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker
Image
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
Image
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.
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
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
Image
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
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
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest Becker
Image
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Ernest Becker
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker
Image
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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