Ernest Becker

what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed.

daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum.

reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.

depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.8 He also, as Adler pointed out, gets the people around him to respond to him, to pity him, and to value him and take care of him. He controls them and heightens his own personality by his very self-pity and self-hatred.

Therefore the misfortune does not consist in the fact that such a self did not amount to anything in the world; no, the misfortune is that the man did not become aware of himself,

The loss of possibility signifies: either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial.