Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest BeckerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The fear of death drives much of human behavior as people strive to find meaning and deny its inevitability.
Ernest Becker's quote explores the profound impact that the fear of death has on human existence. He suggests that this fear is a fundamental motivation for many of our actions, as individuals seek to create meaning and purpose in their lives to counter the ultimate reality of mortality. This struggle against the finality of death shapes our ambitions, relationships, and the very nature of our existence.
Themes
DeathFearHuman ActivityMeaningMortality
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about existential philosophy at a seminar.
More from Ernest Becker
All quotes →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 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
The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.
Abraham Joshua HeschelRead
The proclamation of the Gospel is destined primarily to the poor, to those who often lack the essentials for a decent life. The good news is first announced to them, that God loves them before all others and comes to visit them through the acts of charity that the disciples of Christ carry out in his name.
Pope FrancisRead
There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynRead
I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
Georges BatailleRead
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
SophoclesRead
Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.
Louis PasteurRead