Top 100 Ernest Becker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.”

— Ernest Becker

2. “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.”

— Ernest Becker

3. “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

4. “Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.”

— Ernest Becker

5. “If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.”

— Ernest Becker

6. “War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.”

— Ernest Becker

7. “Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.”

— Ernest Becker

8. “All power is in essence power to deny mortality.”

— Ernest Becker

9. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.”

— Ernest Becker

10. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”

— Ernest Becker

11. “Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”

— Ernest Becker

12. “Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”

— Ernest Becker

13. “Horror alone brings peace of mind.”

— Ernest Becker

14. “The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn’t make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker

16. “We are gods with anuses.”

— Ernest Becker

17. “Man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker

19. “The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.”

— Ernest Becker

20. “Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker

22. “When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.”

— Ernest Becker

23. “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

24. “People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.”

— Ernest Becker

25. “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”

— Ernest Becker

26. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

27. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

28. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”

— Ernest Becker

29. “This is the uniquely human need, what man everywhere is really all about – each person’s need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life – the heroic contributor to the destiny of man.”

— Ernest Becker

30. “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

31. “Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.”

— Ernest Becker

32. “Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.”

— Ernest Becker

33. “Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man’s power worship.”

— Ernest Becker

34. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker

36. “The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to “die,” in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, the the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures.”

— Ernest Becker

37. “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

38. “The “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker

40. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

41. “Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.”

— Ernest Becker

42. “If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.”

— Ernest Becker

43. “The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something–an object or ourselves–and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”

— Ernest Becker

44. “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

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

— Ernest Becker

46. “The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.10 There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.”

— Ernest Becker

47. “To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself.”

— Ernest Becker

48. “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

49. “In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker