Fanny Howe Quotes

Another life, if it were not better than this, would be less a promise than a threat.

We refuse to believe that this present world is the sum total of human existence.

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

If there's another world, he lives in bliss; if there is none, he made the best of this.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

Through the ages, man's main concern was life after death. Today, for the first time, we find we must ask questions about whether there will be life before death.

Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.

Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.

Surely there must be a better gift God could have given us than life?

If our Creator has so bountifully provided for our existence here, which is but momentary, and for our temporal wants, which will soon be forgotten, how much more must He have done for our enjoyment in the everlasting world?

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.

The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

I wanted a heaven. And I grew up striving for that world-- an eternal world- that would wash away my temporary misery.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.

Who knoweth if to die be but to live, and that called life by mortals be but death?

As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie.

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.