Charles Fort Quotes

#1. 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.

Charles Fort

#2. I have taken the stand that nobody can be always wrong, but it does seem to me that I have approximated so highly that I am nothing short of a negative genius.

Charles Fort

#3. It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out.

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#5. Peasants have believed in dowsing, and scientists used to believe that dowsing was only a belief of peasants. Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing that the suspicion comes to me that it may only be a myth after all.

Charles Fort

#6. All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments. Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#8. All would be well. All would be heavenly
If the damned would only stay damned.

Charles Fort

#9. We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.

Charles Fort

#10. The theologians have recognized that the ideal is the imitation of God. If we be a part of such an organic thing, this thing is God to us, as I am God to the cells that compose me.

Charles Fort

#11. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.

Charles Fort

#12. A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Charles Fort

#13. The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.

Charles Fort

#14. In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere.

Charles Fort

#15. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.

Charles Fort

#16. There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

Charles Fort

#17. 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.

Charles Fort

#18. It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was -

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#20. Do you want power over something? Be more nearly real than it.

Charles Fort

#21. what we call existence is a womb of infinitude, and is itself only incubatory - that eventually all attempts are broken down by the falsely excluded.

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#23. Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.

Charles Fort

#24. When we come upon assurances that a mystery has been solved, we go on investigating.

Charles Fort

#25. When, upon the closed system of normal preoccupations, a story of a sea serpent appears, it is inhospitably treated. To us of the wider cordialities, it has recommendations for kinder reception. I think that we shall be noted in recognitions of good works for our bizarre charities.

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#27. But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete - By Truth, I mean the Universal.

Charles Fort

#28. Call it swoon, or call it hypnosis--but that it is never absolute, and that all of us sometimes have awareness of our condition, and moments of wondering what it's all about and why we do and think the things that sometimes we wake up and find ourselves doing and thinking. Upon

Charles Fort

#29. 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.

Charles Fort

#30. My liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences?

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#32. Against all the opposition in the world, I make this statement - that once I knew a magician. I was a witness of a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic.

Charles Fort

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

Charles Fort

#34. The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.

Charles Fort