A Quote by Ernest Becker

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.

Ernest Becker

Quote Topics

Confrontation Death Defiance Excitement Fed Man Maximum Others Rapture Skillful Watching

Quote Author

Ernest Becker
American - Anthropologist
September 27, 1924 - March 6, 1974

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Virginia Woolf

A wasteland is a confrontation to a man of stature: an empty place, a gauntlet thrown down in challenge and defiance. A place like that cries out to be conquered and civilised.

John C. Wright

We want to be in a situation under maximum pressure, maximum intensity, and maximum danger. When it's shared with others, it provides a bond which is stronger than any tie that can exist.

Seal

Robert Louis Stevenson, one evening, stood transfixed at his nursery window watching the lamplighter in the street. When his nanny asked the boy what he was doing he replied: 'I'm watching the man knocking holes in the darkness.' We live in a universe made dark by sin. Let's knock holes in the darkness.

Selwyn Hughes

The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue - even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been.

Ben Bernanke

As a kid, I sat transfixed watching Ray Harryhausen's '7th Voyage of Sinbad.'

Raymond E. Feist

Assuming that rapture is nature's play with man, the Dionysian artist's creative activity is the play with rapture.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A skillful commander is not overbearing. A skillful fighter does not become angry. A skillful conqueror does not compete with people. One who is skillful in using men puts himself below them. This is called the strength to use men. This is called matching Heaven, The highest principle of old.

Laozi

That a man lives is because he is straight. That a man who dupes others survives is because he has been fortunate enough to be spared.

Confucius

Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

Francis Schaeffer

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.

Stanley Milgram

'Son of Saul' film is extremely emotional; you're watching people walk in, you're watching people die. It centers around a child that goes into the ovens but survives the gassing.

Bun B

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

Charles Darwin

Everybody is afraid of death for the simple reason that we have not tasted of life yet. The man who knows what life is, is never afraid of death; he welcomes death. Whenever death comes he hugs death, he embraces death, he welcomes death, he receives death as a guest. To the man who has not known what life is, death is an enemy; and to the man who knows what life is, death is the ultimate crescendo of life.