Charles Fort Quotes
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'Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.'
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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.
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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.
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Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. 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.
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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?
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The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.
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The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
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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.
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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'
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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.
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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.
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Ch. 7 at resologist.net
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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.
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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.
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Ch. 6 at resologist.net
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I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.
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My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike ever to mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way. Anything that assimilates with one explanation, must have assimilable relations, to some degree, with all other explanations, if all explanations are somewhere continuous.
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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.
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Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt.
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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.
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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.
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One can't learn much and also be comfortable. One can't learn much and let anybody else be comfortable.
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Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native.