Charles Fort > Quotes

“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.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“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.”
― Charles Fort, Lo!

“Let a god change anything, and there will be reactions of evil as much as good. Only stupidity can be divine.”
― Charles Fort, Lo!

“I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“I conceive of the magic of prayers. I conceive of the magic of blasphemies. There is witchcraft in religion: there may be witchcraft in atheism.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

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

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

“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”
― Charles Fort

“The mind of no man is a unit, but is a community of mental states that influence one another.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“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”
― Charles Fort

“If I will write a book, I will write it triumphantly.”
― Charles Fort

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

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

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

“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.”
― Charles Fort, Wild Talents

“It seems to me that, very strikingly here, is borne out the general acceptance that ours is only an intermediate existence, in which there is nothing fundamental, or nothing final to take as a positive standard to judge by. Peasants believed in meteorites. Scientists excluded meteorites. Peasants believe in "thunderstones." Scientists exclude "thunderstones." It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields, and that scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms. We cannot take for a real base that, as to phenomena with which they are more familiar, peasants are more likely to be right than are scientists: a host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against us.”
― Charles Fort, The Fortean Collection: The Book of The Damned, New Lands, LO!, Wild Talents, The Outcast Manufacturers

“The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness. The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer. But the spirit of the whole is processional. The power, that has said to all these things that they are damned, is dogmatic science. But they'll march! The little harlots will caper and the freaks will distract the attention and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries. But the solidity of the procession as a whole, the solidity of things which pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on coming, the irresistibleness of things that neither threaten, nor jeer, nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.”
― Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

“Por belleza, designaría yo lo que parece completo. Lo incompleto o lo mutilado es totalmente feo. A la Venus de Milo, un niño la encontraría fea. Si un espíritu puro la imagina completa, se convertiría en bella. Una mano concebida como mano puede parecer bella. Abandonada en un campo de batalla, deja de serlo. Pero todo lo que nos rodea es parte de una cosa que a su vez es parte de otra: en este mundo no hay nada bello; sólo las apariencias son intermedias entre la belleza y la fealdad. Sólo es completa la universalidad, sólo es bello el completo.”
― Charles Hoy Fort

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

“If I will write a book, I will write it triumphantly”
― Charles Fort

“Mi posición es la siguiente: todas las cosas que parecen poseer una identidad individual no son más que islas, proyecciones de un continente submarino, y no contienen contornos reales.”
― Charles Hoy Fort