The Denial Of Death Quotes
"In times such as ours, there is a great pressure to come up with concepts that help men understand their dilemma."
"The idea of heroism is vital, yet often overlooked in scholarly times, though always recognized as important by the popular mind."
"The development of social science and psychology represents a massive detailing and clarification of the problem of human heroism."
"The concept of 'narcissism' is one of Freud's great and lasting contributions, revealing our absorption with ourselves."
"Our basic narcissism makes us feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves."
"Man’s urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it is honest."
"Society is a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism."
"The most important question man can ask himself is how conscious he is of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism."
"The crisis of modern society is that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up."
"The essence of man is his paradoxical nature, half animal and half symbolic."
"To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams."
"The Oedipal project is the child's attempt to become God, to become causa sui, in a flight from death."
"The primal scene can be traumatic, not because the child can't join in the sexual act, but because it is a symbol of an anxious multiple bind."
"Human character is a defense against the terror of nonbeing, a vital lie that covers up the basic anxieties of our condition."
"Man reduces the problem of life to the area of sexuality as a screen against full consciousness about the real problem of life."
"For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost."
"He uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."
"We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones)."
"Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long."
"Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness."
"The fear of one’s own greatness and the evasion of one’s destiny."
"Each thing is a problem, and man can shut out nothing."
"It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of."
"The fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world."
"Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom."
"One is a creature who can do nothing, but one exists over against a living God for whom 'everything is possible.'"
"Anxiety 'is the possibility of freedom,' because anxiety demolishes 'all finite aims,' and so the 'man who is educated by possibility is educated in accordance with his infinity.'"
"Possibility leads nowhere if it does not lead to faith."
"The faith that one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things."
"Not that [faith] annihilates dread, but remaining ever young, it is continually developing itself out of the death throe of dread."
"The true autodidact [is] precisely in the same degree a theodidact."
"In our innermost soul we are still children, and we remain so throughout life."
"As the highest ambition of the child is to obey the all-powerful parent, to believe in him, and to imitate him, what is more natural than an instant, imaginary return to childhood via the hypnotic trance?"
"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style."
"The important conclusion for us is that the groups 'use' the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges."
"He simply loads them up with his own baggage; he follows them with reservations, with a dishonest heart."
"When they give in to the leader’s commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are alien to them, that they are the leader’s responsibility."
"The leader takes responsibility for the destructive act, and those who destroy on his command are no longer murderers, but 'holy heroes.'"
"Man needs to infuse his life with value so that he can pronounce it 'good.'"
"As a rule, we find the two aspects hopelessly confused in modern relationships, where one person is made the godlike judge over good and bad in the other person."
"Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness."
"In order to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself."
"What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others."
"After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or another washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved."
"To lie to oneself about one’s own potential development is another cause of guilt."
"Guilt results from unused life, from 'the unlived in us.'"
"The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead."
"Neurosis represents creative power gone astray and confused."
"The neurotic preoccupied with his symptom is led to believe that his central task is one of confrontation with his particular obsession or phobia."
"Religion takes one’s very creatureliness, one’s insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope."
"Man lives his contradictions for better or worse in some kind of cultural project in a given historical period."
"Man is not helped by more 'knowing,' but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way."
"The schizophrenic is not programmed neurally into automatic response to social meanings, but he cannot marshal an ego response, a directive control of his experiences."
"The perversions are not marginal at all. They reveal what is at stake in human action better than any other behavior because they narrow it down to its essentials."
"The fetishist needs some object like a shoe or a corset before he can begin to make love to a woman because the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego."
"Freud made possible the conquest of this most difficult terrain."
"The horror of castration is not the horror of punishment for incestuous sexuality, it is rather the existential anxiety of life and death."
"The body makes no sense to us in its physical thingness, which ties us to a particular kind of fate, a one-sided sexual role."
"The hermaphroditic image represents a striving for wholeness, not sexual but ontological."
"Freud was right to see the centrality of the image of the phallic mother and to connect it directly with the castration complex."
"The child wants to see the omnipotent mother, the miraculous source of all his protection, nourishment, and love, as a really godlike creature."
"The horror of the female genitals is the shock of the tiny child who is all at once suddenly turned into a philosopher, a tragedian."
"The body is the hurdle for man, the decaying drag of the species on the inner freedom and purity of his self."
"The problem of personal freedom versus species determinism is central to understanding human behavior."
"A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition."
"This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—he feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned."
"Indeed, because of that development his eyes are opened to the reality of things; there is no turning back to the comforts of a secure and armored life."
"Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life’s way."
"Psychotherapy can allow people to affirm themselves, to smash idols that constrict the self-esteem, to lift the load of neurotic guilt."
"Only angels know unrelieved joy—or are able to stand it."
"No organismic life can be straightforwardly self-expansive in all directions; each one must draw back into himself in some areas, pay some penalty of a severe kind for his natural fears and limitations."
"Life itself is the insurmountable problem."
"The only argument for the truth of this Gospel of New Being is that the message makes itself true."
"If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world."
"The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force."