Quotes from Ernest Becker

Horror alone brings peace of mind.

Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.

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.

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth.

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.

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

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

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.

Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.

I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.

Man must always imagine and believe in a second reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.