Charles Fort Quotations

If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

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

All would be well. All would be heavenly--If the damned would only stay damned.

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

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

If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen.

I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs.

Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt.

The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you will make of their circumstances the litter you have made of your own.

Science of to-day-the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow-the superstition of to-day.

One can't be of an enquiring and experimental nature, and still be very sensible.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.

I think, therefore I'm going to have breakfast.

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.

In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 damed; that salvation only precedes perdition.

Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.

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.

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?

Phenomena of a man alone on a desert island can be explained in terms of "mass psychology" - inasmuch as the mind of no man is a unit, but is a community of mental states that influence one another.

If "mass psychology" applies definitely to one occurrence, it must, even though almost imperceptibly, apply to all occurrences.

In 1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are revolting and trying to conceive of something else.

A good many brats are brought up, in the straight and narrow, somewhat deviously.