Ernest Becker Quotes

″...death itself is not only a state, but a complex symbol, the significance of which will vary from one person to another and from one culture to another.”

“The child who has good maternal experiences will develop a sense of basic security and will not be subject to morbid fears of losing support, being annihilated, or the like.”

“Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will chose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless and supremely meaningful.”

“On the most elemental level the organism works actively against its own fragility by seeking to expand and perpetuate itself in living experience; instead of shrinking, it moves toward more life.”

“The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that: 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.”

″...if you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed, you can’t lose.”

“The prospect of death... wonderfully concentrates the mind.”

“We should feel prepared, as Emerson once put it, to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed.”

“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.”

“In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised. The child is unashamed about what he needs and wants most.”