Quotes About Ernest Becker

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

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

There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed.

neurosis as a problem of character and have seen that it can be approached in two ways: as a problem of too much narrowness toward the world or of too much openness.

Then let us raise children within a codified hero-system, that will permit us to survive and thrive according to our peculiar needs.

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams.

the great increase in bitterness and frustration in the modern world is largely due to the eclipse of the sacred dimension

Ernest Becker writes, "The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to society." Well