It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
Ernest BeckerOnce you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
Ernest BeckerWe consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.
Ernest Becker