Charles Fort quotes

" "If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?" " # Sanity # Madness # Mind

" My own pseudo-conclusion: That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences. " # Death and Dying # Pain # Science and Scientists

" The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open. " # Fate # Love # Action

" A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. " # Science and Scientists # Information # Mathematics

" 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. " # Love # Death and Dying # Heaven

" 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. " # Travel and Tourism # Beauty # Ugliness

" 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. " # School # Truth # Writers and Writing

" The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely. " # Politicians and Politics # Humankind # Reason

" 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. " # Evolution # Stupidity # Truth

" Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt. " # Passion # Women # Faith