Top 50 Charles Fort Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Earth is a farm. We are someone else’s property.”

— Charles Fort

2. “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

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

— Charles Fort

4. “One can’t learn much and also be comfortable One can’t learn much and let anybody else be comfortable.”

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

6. “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.”

— Charles Fort

7. “All would be well. All would be heavenly – If the damned would only stay damned.”

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

10. “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

11. “The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.”

— Charles Fort

12. “Against all the opposition in the world, I make this statement – that once I knew a magician. I was a witness of a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic.”

— Charles Fort

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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.”

— Charles Fort

16. “Science of to-day-the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow-the superstition of to-day.”

— Charles Fort

17. “But some of us have been educated by surprises out of much that we were ‘absolutely sure’ of...”

— Charles Fort

18. “Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.”

— Charles Fort

19. “In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere.”

— Charles Fort

20. “If there is a true universal mind, must it be sane?”

— Charles Fort

21. “The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest – weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. ‘Fitness,’ then, is only another name for ‘survival.’ Darwinism: That survivors survive.”

— Charles Fort

22. “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

23. “I think we’re all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

25. “It’s like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was –.”

— Charles Fort

26. “It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out.”

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

28. “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

29. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you will make of their circumstances the litter you have made of your own.”

— Charles Fort

30. “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

31. “But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete – By Truth, I mean the Universal.”

— Charles Fort

32. “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.”

— Charles Fort

33. “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.”

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

35. “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 damed; that salvation only precedes perdition.”

— Charles Fort

36. “I think, therefore I’m going to have breakfast.”

— Charles Fort

37. “If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there’s any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen.”

— Charles Fort

38. “My liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences?”

— Charles Fort

39. “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

40. “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

41. “When we come upon assurances that a mystery has been solved, we go on investigating.”

— Charles Fort

42. “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

43. “Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt.”

— Charles Fort

44. “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

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

— Charles Fort

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

— Charles Fort

47. “One can’t be of an enquiring and experimental nature, and still be very sensible.”

— Charles Fort

48. “I am God to the cells that compose me.”

— Charles Fort

49. “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

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

— Charles Fort