Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Beckerwas a Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 September 1924
awareness rumble terror
To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
sports men feds
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.
spring real creativity
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.
drinking men shopping
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
destiny self perfect
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.
hero evil victory
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
creativity detours ends
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
death destiny men
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.
mind peace-of-mind horror
Horror alone brings peace of mind.
guilt results
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
men victory dying
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
men self giving
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
art personality world
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.
queens children taken
We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.