Charles Fort Quotes

Charles Fort presents grand, philosophical musings on science, belief and the nature of existence.

41 quotes

1. A procession of the damned.

2. My own pseudo-conclusion: That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathemized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.

3. The fittest survive.

4. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them - or they'll march.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.

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

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

11. ...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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 'Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing, that the suspicion comes to me that it may be only a myth after all.'

15. 'I cannot accept that the products of the mind are subject-matter for belief.'

16. 'My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike to ever mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way.'

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

18. 'But 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 coincidence?'

19. 'In hosts of minds, today, are impressions that the word 'eerie' means nothing except convenience to makers of crossword puzzles. There are gulfs of the unaccountable, but they are bridged by terminology.'

20. 'Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native.'

21. '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.'

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

23. 'If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?'

24. [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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

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

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

29. 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.

30. 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.

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

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

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

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

35. 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.

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

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

38. 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.

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

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

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