The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of exยญperience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" creaยญtivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.
Ernest BeckerIf everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.
Ernest BeckerOnce you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
Ernest BeckerIf the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.
Ernest BeckerFor 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