Ernest Becker Lying Quotations

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

If 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.

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.