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.
More Quotes from 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 fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.Ernest Becker
We now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of humanity is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.
Ernest Becker
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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 terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow
Ernest Becker
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.
Ernest Becker
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Topics: Animals Quotes, Life Quotes, Love Quotes, Man Quotes, Nature QuotesI feel like B sides are always better, no matter whose record it is.
Alicia Keys
I ate a bug once. It was flying around me. I was trying to get it away. It went right in my mouth. It was so gross!
Hilary Duff
I like the catholicity in time: our tradition is one of 2,000 years.
Hans Kung