Charles Fort Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

Charles Fort
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.

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

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

Charles Fort
I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data.

Charles Fort
In Continuity, it is impossible to distinguish phenomena at their merging-points, so we look for them at their extremes. Impossible to distinguish between animal and vegetable in some infusoria - but hippopotamus and violet. For all practical purposes they're distinguishable enough.

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

Charles Fort
If the Law of Gravitation could be stated as a real utterance, it might be a real resistance to us. But we are told only that gravitation is gravitation.

Charles Fort
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.

Charles Fort
The interpretations will be mine, but the data will be for anybody to form his own opinions on.

Charles Fort
If a comet have not the orbit that astronomers have predicted - perturbed. If - like Halley's comet - it be late - even a year late - perturbed. When a train is an hour late, we have small opinion of the predictions of time tables. When a comet's a year late, all we ask is - that it be explained.

Charles Fort
There never is a moment when there is not some comet in the sky. Virtually there is no year in which several new comets are not discovered, so plentiful are they. Luminous fleas on a vast black dog - in popular impressions, there is no realization of the extent to which this solar system is flea-bitten.

Charles Fort
A whirlwind runs amok, and is filled with confusions...

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

Charles Fort
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
In 1846, everyone who knew a sine from a cosine was out sining and cosining for a planet beyond Uranus. Two of them guessed right.

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

Charles Fort
If nobody looks up, or checks up, what the astronomers tell us, they are free to tell us anything that they want to tell us.

Charles Fort
The great difficulty that authoritativeness has to contend with is some other authoritativeness.

Charles Fort
Unknown, luminous things, or beings, have often been seen, sometimes close to this earth, and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else in our existence, but that others were lights on vessels of explorers, or voyagers, from somewhere else.

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

Charles Fort
A river... is water expressing the gravitational relation of different levels.

Charles Fort
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.

Charles Fort
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.

Charles Fort
The tornado came wriggling, jumping, whirling like a great green snake, darting out a score of glistening fangs.

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

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.

Charles Fort
Would we if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relations with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation? I think we're property

Charles Fort
I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. 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. But I accept, with reservations that give me freedom to ridicule the statement at any other time, that showers of an edible substance that has not been traced to an origin upon this earth, have fallen from the sky, in Asia Minor.

Charles Fort
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.

Charles Fort