Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Beckerwas a Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 September 1924
Ernest Becker quotes about
lying mean reality
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.
pain inspirational-life mean
I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know, that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?
mean animal men
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. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?
animal herd led man
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
men mad cost
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
guilt slavery kind
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
fall existential denial-of-death
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
love animal order
Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
analysis existentialism problem
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
creativity
The road to creativity passes...
responsibility guilt burden
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
anus
We are gods with anuses.
sorry war men
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.
fun men play
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.