If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself. Ernest Becker More Quotes by Ernest Becker More Quotes From Ernest Becker Horror alone brings peace of mind. Ernest Becker peace-of-mind horror mind Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship. Ernest Becker devastation worship men Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death. Ernest Becker victory hero evil Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us. Ernest Becker results guilt 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 self animal mean Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing. Ernest Becker desperate trying lying Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. Ernest Becker existentialism levels men The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. Ernest Becker keys creative world Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude — even dishonor and betrayal — to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the “others,” disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom — on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces. Ernest Becker depressed-person betrayal real 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. Ernest Becker anxiety inspirational-life men Love is the problem of an animal. Ernest Becker problem animal love-is Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death. Ernest Becker victory dying men 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 creativity real spring Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem. Ernest Becker heroism support men 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. Ernest Becker denial-of-death burden men For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture. Ernest Becker feds sports 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. Ernest Becker sorry men war When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem Ernest Becker real religious men Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility. Ernest Becker burden guilt responsibility 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. Ernest Becker play fun men
