“We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.”

—  Ernest Becker

Source: The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man (1962), p. 27

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get …" by Ernest Becker?
Ernest Becker photo
Ernest Becker 26
American anthropologist 1924–1974

Related quotes

Teal Swan photo

“Because we have learned that our parents and other people cannot accept our emotions, thoughts and desires and we cannot tolerate them in that situation, we learn to disconnect from our personal truth as well. This includes disconnecting from our feelings so we don't feel them. This includes disconnecting from our thoughts so we aren't thinking them. It means disconnecting from our bodies so we don't feel our bodies and it involves disconnecting from our personal desires.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher
Byron Katie photo

“Our parents, our children, our spouses, and our friends will continue to press every button we have, until we realize what it is that we don't want to know about ourselves, yet. They will point us to our freedom every time.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Source: Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

Sarah McLachlan photo

“I'm so tired but I can't sleep,
Standin' on the edge of something much too deep.
It's funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word;
We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

I Will Remember You
Song lyrics, The Brothers McMullen soundtrack (1995)

Ilchi Lee photo

“There is a serious discrepancy between what we really wants, and what we usually do to get what we think we want. What we really want is to fill the hole inside and become complete, and what we do is look for success and growth outside.”

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Source: Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential

Jim Henson photo

“We see with our eyes. We know with our hearts. Outside… Inside.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

“we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves… But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves -- unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Paulo Coelho photo

“In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 97.
Context: In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

Freda Foh Shen photo

“a lot of actors, we create a backstory of our own in our heads and we often relate it to our intimates in the film, say my husband. But it just depends on how actors want to work.”

Freda Foh Shen (1948) American actress

Freda Foh Shen for BOOKS OF BLOOD https://www.nightmarishconjurings.com/2020/10/17/interview-freda-foh-shen-for-books-of-blood/ (October 17, 2020)

Abraham Lincoln photo

“The truth is, that this question is one of national importance, and we cannot help dealing with it: we must do something about it, whether we will or not. We cannot avoid it; the subject is one we cannot avoid considering; we can no more avoid it than a man can live without eating. It is upon us; it attaches to the body politic as much and as closely as the natural wants attach to our natural bodies. Now I think it important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled. And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)

Vasily Grossman photo

“And the greatest tragedy of our age is we don't listen to our consciences. We don't say what we think. We feel one thing and do another.”

Vasily Grossman book Life and Fate

Source: Life and Fate

Related topics