Talk:Ernest Becker

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• Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
• We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active work project.
• 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.
• It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
• Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
• For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
• When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
• Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons. New York Times, 28 December 2023 (possible source for first sentence)

Is the author photo correct

I don’t think this is Ernest Becker. click on the photo which takes you to the caption over on wiki commons site.Christian Roess (talk) 04:45, 1 December 2022 (UTC)