Philosophy Quote by Ernest Becker — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.”

“We are gods with anuses.”

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

“The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever”

“Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning”

“the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith”

“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”

“The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.”

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”

“All statistics have outliers.”

“To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital.”