Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest BeckerRead
It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that the lies we tell ourselves for comfort ultimately prevent us from living authentically.
Ernest Becker's quote reflects on the paradox of human existence, wherein the false narratives we create for ourselves often serve as a coping mechanism, allowing us to navigate life's challenges. However, these same lies can trap us, making it difficult to embrace our true selves and fully experience life on our own terms. This irony highlights the struggle between the need for comforting illusions and the desire for genuine authenticity.
Themes
AuthenticityLiesLifeIllusionSelf
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about personal identity in a psychology class.
More from Ernest Becker
All quotes βThe 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 BeckerRead
When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
Ernest BeckerRead
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest BeckerRead
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.
Ernest BeckerRead
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Ernest BeckerRead
Similar quotes
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Terence MckennaRead
Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
Thomas HardyRead
Curses of vanished elders echoed down on me; too pretty, too soft, too pale, eyes far too full of the Devil, ah, that devilish smile
Anne RiceRead
We have to have powder for our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
"Why are breakfast food breakfast foods?" I asked them. "Like, why don't we have curry for breakfast?" "Hazel, eat." "But why?" I asked. "I mean seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it's a breakfast sandwich."
John GreenRead
First in violence, deepest in dirt, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a - village, the "tough" among cities, a spectacle for the nation.
Lincoln SteffensRead