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“It is wrong to say that man is a peacock, if we mean thereby to belittle his urge to self-glorification, and make it seem a mere matter of vanity and self display. The constant harangue that we address to one another: “notice me,” “love me,” “esteem me” “value me,” would seem debasing and ignoble. But when we tally the sum of these efforts, the excruciating earnestness of them, the eternal grinding out of the inner newsreel, we can see that something really big is going on – really vital…”
― Ernest Becker

“What does it mean “to be born again” for man? It means for the first time to be subjected to the terrifying paradox of the human condition, since one must be born not as a god, but as a man, or as a god-worm, or a god who shits”.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“psychoanalyst” without fear of being laughed at—or at least with confidence that the scoffers are uninformed. In the last few decades a new discovery of Kierkegaard has been taking place, a discovery that is momentous because it links him into the whole structure of knowledge in the humanities in our time. We used to think that there was a strict difference between science and belief and that psychiatry and religion were consequently far apart. But now we find that psychiatric and religious perspectives on reality are intimately related. For one thing they grow out of one another historically, as we shall see in a later section. Even more importantly for now, they reinforce one another. Psychiatric experience and religious experience cannot be separated either subjectively in the person’s own eyes or objectively in the theory of character development. Nowhere is this merger of religious and psychiatric categories clearer than in the work of Kierkegaard. He gave us some of the best empirical”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“I have tried to avoid moving against and negating any point of view, no matter how personally antipathetic to me, if it seems to have in it a core of truthfulness.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“In the neurotic in whom one sees the collapse of the whole human ideology of God it has also become obvious what this signifies psychologically. This was not explained by Freud’s psychoanalysis which only comprehended the destructive process in the patient from his personal history without considering the cultural development which bred this type.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Cultivating awareness of our death leads to disillusionment, loss of character armor, and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“It will be easy for us to understand at this point that menopause simply reawakens the horror of the body, the utter bankruptcy of the body as a viable causa-sui project — the exact experience that brings on the early Oedipal castration anxiety. The woman is reminded in the most forceful way that she is an animal thing; menopause is a sort of "animal birthday" that specifically marks the physical career of degeneration. It is like nature imposing a definite physical milestone on the person, putting up a wall and saying "You are not going any further into life now, you are going toward the end, to the absolute determinism of death." As men don't have such animal birthdays, such specific markers of a physical kind, they don't usually experience another stark discrediting of the body as a causa-sui project. Once has been enough, and they bury the problem with the symbolic powers of the cultural world-view. But the woman is less fortunate; she is put in the position of having all at once to catch up psychologically with the physical facts of life. To paraphrase Goethe's aphorism, death doesn't keep knocking on her door only to be ignored (as men ignore their aging), but kicks it in to show himself full in the face.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Now, what is unique about the child's perception of the world? For one thing, the extreme confusion of cause-and-effect relationships; for another, extreme unreality about the limits of his own powers. The child lives in a situation of utter dependence; and when his needs are met it must seem to him that he has magical powers, real omnipotence. If he experiences pain, hunger, or discomfort, all he has to do is to scream and he is relieved and lulled by gentle, loving sounds. He is a magician and a telepath who has only to mumble and to imagine and the world turns to his desires.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“These are, in sum, the two great uniquenesses of human life—regularized food-sharing and cooperation with others—and they are unknown among the subhuman primates.”
― Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

“Rank’ın çok akıllıca bir şekilde keşfettiği gibi, yansıtma bireyin zorunlu bir yükünü hafifletmektir; insan kendisine kapalı yaşayamaz. Hayatının anlamını, nedenini, hatta suçunu dışarıya yansıtmalıdır. Kendimizi yaratmadık, ama kendimize sıkışıp kaldık.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“At what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic? No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death