Quotes from Charles Fort

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.

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

I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity — such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen — stationary meteor-radiants, and a reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy — and 'Did the girl swallow the octopus?

It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—

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.

Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things.

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.

I am God to the cells that compose me.

No conozco ninguna norma en cuestiones de religión, filosofía, ciencia, ni complicación de las tareas domésticas, que no pueda ser moldeada para que se ajuste a cualquier exigencia. Ajustamos las normas a nuestras opiniones o quebrantamos una ley que nos apetece quebrantar

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

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

If the basic fallacies, or the absence of base, in every specialization of thought can be seen by the units of its opposition, why then we see that all supposed foundations in our whole existence are myths, and that all discussion and supposed progress are the conflicts of phantoms and the overthrow of old delusions by new delusions. Nevertheless

That social organism is embryonic. That firmly to believe is to impede development. That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.

So, then, in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that, like a purgatory, all that is commonly called "existence," which we call Intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a real existence.

I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned. I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages—but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.

The mind of no man is a unit, but is a community of mental states that influence one another.

That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been attained.

Let a god change anything, and there will be reactions of evil as much as good. Only stupidity can be divine.

If I will write a book, I will write it triumphantly.

Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from the event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies.

If good and evil are continuous, any crime can be linked with any virtue. Imposture merges away into self-deception so that only relatively has there ever been impostor.

There is a continuity of all things that make classifications fictions. But all human knowledge depends upon arrangements. Then all books--scientific, theological, philosophical--are only literary.

I think we're property. I should say we belong to something: That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something: That something owns this earth -- all others warned off.

undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind, because that touch of relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming.