What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

- Ernest Becker

The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all …

- Ernest Becker

The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; b…

- Ernest Becker

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves

- Ernest Becker

We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an ob…

- Ernest Becker

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terro…

- Ernest Becker

If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themsel…

- Ernest Becker

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 fa…

- Ernest Becker

To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

- Ernest Becker