The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.Ernest Becker
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.Ernest Becker
The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.Ernest Becker
We are gods with anuses.Ernest Becker
The fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death is a matter of anxiety, of projection of danger into the future.Ernest Becker
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.Ernest Becker
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thingErnest Becker
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
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.Ernest Becker
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.Ernest Becker