47 Insightful Quotes By Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker was a celebrated Jewish-American writer, famous for his work ‘The Denial of Death’. His writing and books were influenced by the impact of social psychology and psychology of religion. His highly successful ‘Terror Management Theory’ has led to creation of over 200 published studies. He transformed his agenda of cultural affects of death anxiety into a proven scientific axiom. His other notable works include ‘The Lost Science of Man’, ‘The Structure of Evil’ and ‘Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man’. After his death, the Ernst Becker Foundation was established which monitors study of human behavior based on Becker’s research and theories. A documentary film titled ‘Flight from Death’, based on Becker’s inference on the reduction of violence in human society, was released in 2009. Here are few quotes and sayings from this famous anthropologist.
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
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.
We are gods with anuses.
To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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.
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.
Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
We might say that both the artist and the neurotic 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
Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.
The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.
The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it.
To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.
The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.
What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself.
I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith—no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone. —OMAR KHAYYAM
Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat “atheistic communism.
Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one’s life.
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.
