Quotes from Charles Fort

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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