Charles Fort Quotes

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

[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.

In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere.

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

The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.