By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else — 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 can not 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. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant, though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own. It is the problem of continuity-discontinuity, which perhaps I shall have to take up sometime."

"There are cynics who deny the existence of human gratitude. But it seems that I am no cynic. So convinced am I of the existence of gratitude that I see in it one of our strongest oppositions. There are millions of persons who receive favors that they forget: but gratitude does exist, and theyve got to express it somewhere. They take it out by being grateful to science for all that science has done for them, a gratitude, which, according to their dull perceptions wont cost them anything. So there is economic indignation against anybody who is disagreeable to science. He is trying to rob the people of a cheap gratitude. I like a bargain as well as does anybody else, but I cant save expenses by being grateful to Science, if for every scientist who has perhaps been of benefit to me, there have been many other scientists who have tried to strangle that possible benefit."

"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."

"My own pseudo-conclusion: That weve 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. Weve been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences."

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

"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."