Top 100 Ernest Becker Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Man must always imagine and believe in a “second” reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.”

— Ernest Becker

52. “Love is the problem of an animal...”

— Ernest Becker

53. “Human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of man or the self-perpetuation of individual men than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians.”

— Ernest Becker

54. “It is this that makes people so willing ’to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices: those who focus their measured words and their sharpened eyes in the intensity of hate, and so seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction – what calm, what relief.”

— Ernest Becker

55. “Power for man, as the genius of Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less.”

— Ernest Becker

56. “No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man’s terror is always “holy terror”-which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.”

— Ernest Becker

57. “This penetrating vocabulary of “initiatory acts,” “the infectiousness of the unconflicted person,” “priority magic,” and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that “father permits it” or “orders it.” It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion.”

— Ernest Becker

58. “The urge to immortality is not a simple reflex of the death-anxiety but a reaching out by one’s whole being toward life. Perhaps this natural expansion of the creature alone can explain why transference is such a universal passion.”

— Ernest Becker

59. “The road to creativity passes...”

— Ernest Becker

60. “Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.”

— Ernest Becker

61. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

62. “Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.”

— Ernest Becker

63. “Very few of us ever find our authentic talent – usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for.”

— Ernest Becker

64. “To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics – what we might call “prison heroism”: the smugness of the insiders who “know.”

— Ernest Becker

65. “Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures.”

— Ernest Becker

66. “With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer.”

— Ernest Becker

67. “The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.”

— Ernest Becker

68. “The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.”

— Ernest Becker

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

— Ernest Becker

70. “For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth.”

— Ernest Becker

71. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

72. “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.”

— Ernest Becker

73. “The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power. There is something about him that seems to radiate out to others and to melt them into his aura, a “fascinating effect,” as Christine Olden called it, of “the narcissistic personality”3 or, as Jung preferred to call him, the “mana-personality.”

— Ernest Becker

74. “If the frustrations are not surrounded by anxiety, fear of life, insecure love and support, then the child progresses easily and naturally to the new challenges of a symbolic, social way of life. The child that we call, typically, autistic or schizophrenic, is the one who has not been able to feel this secure sense of support to his body; and so he does not make a confident transition from the biological to the social world. The “lever” of.”

— Ernest Becker

75. “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. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence.”

— Ernest Becker

76. “Sartre has called man a “useless passion” because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one’s existence-how take it away from people and leave them joyous?”

— Ernest Becker

77. “Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one’s life.”

— Ernest Becker

78. “In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multidimensional reality.”

— Ernest Becker

79. “Even if men admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. There is no “harmonious development,” no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from men their need for a “beyond” on which to base the meaning of their lives.”

— Ernest Becker

80. “There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.”

— Ernest Becker

81. “This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others – family, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties. In such a bogging down the individual does not feel or see that he has alternatives, cannot imagine any choices or alternate ways of life, cannot release himself from the network of obligations even though these obligations no longer give him a sense of self-esteem, of primary value, of being a heroic contributor to world life even.”

— Ernest Becker

82. “Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.”

— Ernest Becker

83. “William James said long ago, solitude is the greatest terror of childhood.”

— Ernest Becker

84. “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

— Ernest Becker

85. “It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being.”

— Ernest Becker

86. “He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magical umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit – what we call the “mature” character.”

— Ernest Becker

87. “Man is naturally humble, naturally grateful, naturally guilty, naturally transcended, naturally a sufferer; he is small, pitiful, weak, a passive taker who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power.”

— Ernest Becker

88. “We noted that the ego delays responses in order to permit a richer reaction: it allows the organism to choose between several alternatives, reviewed in awareness in lieu of immediate action.”

— Ernest Becker

89. “Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat “atheistic communism.”

— Ernest Becker

90. “It is all right to say, with Adler, that mental illness is due to “problems in living,“-but we must remember that life itself is the insurmountable problem.”

— Ernest Becker

91. “Unlike the baboon who gluts himself only on food, man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem. It.”

— Ernest Becker

92. “The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.”

— Ernest Becker

93. “Much of the loss of temper that we see in family life and in intimate friendships and courtships stems from simply hearing the wrong things at the wrong times.”

— Ernest Becker

94. “Cultural relativity is a pitiless weapon precisely because it sets our hero-systems up on end.”

— Ernest Becker

95. “In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.”

— Ernest Becker

96. “Secrets and silences make life more real: the individual, self-absorbed and inwardly musing, taking himself very seriously, radiates a contagious aura: the tacit communication that the serious and the meaningful exist.”

— Ernest Becker

97. “All through history man has searched for ultimate reality by various means, mystical and intuitive, rational and scientific. Today, some thousands of years after the launching of this search we have had to throw up our hands with Einstein and modern philosophy, and declare that all is relative to our perceptual equipment and to our transcended place.”

— Ernest Becker

98. “In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.”

— Ernest Becker

99. “The important conclusion for us is that the groups “use” the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges.”

— Ernest Becker

100. “Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an “individual” impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes... the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse...”

— Ernest Becker