Charles Fort > Quotes

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

“If there is a true universal mind, must it be sane?”
― Charles Fort

“[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.”
― Charles Fort, Lo!

“The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property.”
― Charles Fort

“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.”
― Charles Fort

“One can't learn much and
also be comfortable
One can't learn much and
let anybody else be comfortable”
― Charles Fort

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

“Is life worth living? Like everybody else, I have many times asked that question, usually deciding negatively, because I am most likely to ask myself whether life is worth living, at times when I am convinced it isn't. One day, in one of my frequent, and probably incurable, scientific moments, it occurred to me to find out. For a month, at the end of each day, I set down a plus sign, or a minus sign, indicating that, in my opinion, life had, or had not, been worth living, that day. At the end of the month, I totted up, and I can't say that I was altogether pleased to learn that the pluses had won the game. It is not dignified to be optimistic.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“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.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“We cannot define. Nothing has ever been finally figured out, because there is nothing final to figure out”
― Charles Fort

“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs.”
― Charles Fort, Lo!

“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.”
― Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

“But some of us have been educated by surprises out of much that we were 'absolutely sure' of...”
― Charles Fort, Lo!

“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.”
― Charles Fort, New Lands

“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.”
― Charles Fort, Lo!

“I am God to the cells that compose me.”
― Charles Fort

“The Earth is a farm. We are someone else’s property.”
― Charles Fort

“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?”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things.”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers

“A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. 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. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway.”
― Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

“It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—”
― Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

“I sent letters of enquiry to all persons whose names were given, and received not one reply. There are several ways of explaining. One is that it is probable that persons who have experiences such as those told of in this book, receive so many "crank letters" that they answer none. Dear me — once upon a time, I enjoyed a sense of amusement and superiority toward "cranks". And now here am I, a "crank", myself. Like most writers, I have the moralist somewhere in my composition, and here I warn — take care, oh, reader, with whom you are amused, unless you enjoy laughing at yourself.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“Collective hallucination is another of the dismissal-labels by which conventionalists shirk thinking. Here is another illustration of the lack of standards, in phenomenal existence, by which to judge anything. One man's story, if not to the liking of conventionalists, is not accepted, because it is not supported; and then testimony by more than one is not accepted, if undesirable, because that is collective hallucination. In this kind of jurisprudence, there is no hope for any kind of testimony against the beliefs in which conventional scientists agree. Among their amusing disregards is that of overlooking that, quite as truly may their own agreements be collective delusions.”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers

“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.”
― Charles Fort, New Lands

“I had used all except peach labels. I pasted the peach labels on peach cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren't apricots peaches? And there are plums that are virtually apricots. I went on, either mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can't quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humourist or a scientist. I think that it was mischief, but, as we go along, there will come a more respectful recognition that also it was scientific procedure.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“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”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers

“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.”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers

“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.”
― Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

“That social organism is embryonic. That firmly to believe is to impede development. That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.”
― Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

“I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers