Ernest Becker

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

We are gods with anuses.

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.

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

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.