Ernest Becker
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)

You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can’t stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can’t allow the complete suffocating of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he; wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof, working out his own private and smaller-scale self-expansion.