Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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
Interpretation
What this quote means
Confusing personal love with grand heroic ideals can lead to failure in both areas.
Ernest Becker suggests that when individuals mix up the intimate nature of personal love with the lofty expectations of heroism, it ultimately devastates both their romantic relationships and their sense of purpose. The unrealistic pursuit of being a hero can distort genuine love, leading to despair and disillusionment in modern life, where both love and heroism become unattainable ideals.
Themes
LoveHeroismDespairRelationshipsModern Man
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the pressures of modern relationships.
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
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
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
Ernest BeckerRead
Similar quotes
The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not out faults, but our wounds. God doesn't want to punish us, but to heal us. And that is how He wishes us to view the wounds in other people.
Marianne WilliamsonRead
We love because it's the only true adventure.
Nikki GiovanniRead
You need the living, loving heart of living, loving men and women to quicken other hearts, which can live too and love too, and, in their turn, will quicken others which are dying now.
Edward Everett HaleRead
neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth -- that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves -- that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night -- so the rope, paper, knife.
Tadeusz BorowskiRead
If his voice hasn't been the melody of my life, it's been the bass line, so subtle you don't notice it until it's missing.
Jodi PicoultRead
I never told my love vocally still.
Emily BronteRead