Top 15 Charles Fort Quotes

Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.

If there is a true universal mind, must it be sane?

[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property.

One can't learn much and
also be comfortable
One can't learn much and
let anybody else be comfortable

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.

Is life worth living? Like everybody else, I have many times asked that question, usually deciding negatively, because I am most likely to ask myself whether life is worth living, at times when I am convinced it isn't. One day, in one of my frequent, and probably incurable, scientific moments, it occurred to me to find out. For a month, at the end of each day, I set down a plus sign, or a minus sign, indicating that, in my opinion, life had, or had not, been worth living, that day. At the end of the month, I totted up, and I can't say that I was altogether pleased to learn that the pluses had won the game. It is not dignified to be optimistic.

The ideal state is meekness, or humility, or the semi-invalid state of the old. Year after year I am becoming nobler and nobler. If I can live to be decrepit enough, I shall be a saint.

We cannot define. Nothing has ever been finally figured out, because there is nothing final to figure out

We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.

"It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came."

But some of us have been educated by surprises out of much that we were 'absolutely sure' of...

Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania — then might I write largely enough for our subjects.

If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.