Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes

The delusion of control—the conviction, apparently immune to correction by mere facts, that the world is a machine incapable of doing anything but the things we want it to do—pervades contemporary life in the world’s industrial societies. People in those societies spend so much more time dealing with machines than they do interacting with other people and other living things without a machine interface getting in the way, that it’s no wonder that this delusion is so widespread. As long as it retains its grip, though, we can expect the industrial world, and especially its privileged classes, to stumble onward from one preventable disaster to another. That’s the inner secret of the delusion of control, after all: those who insist on seeing the world in mechanical terms end up behaving mechanically themselves. Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes, and lurch robotically onward along a trajectory that leads straight to the scrapheap of the future.

John Michael Greer, 'The Delusion of Control' on The Archdruid Report (URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/06/the-delusion-of-control.html, 24/06/2015)

There is necessarily a plurality of interpretations

It is possible, for example, to interpret 'history' as the history of class struggle, or of the struggle of races for supremacy, or as the history of religious ideas, or as the history of the struggle between the 'open' and the 'closed' society, or as the history of scientific and industrial progress. All these are more or less interesting points of view, and as such perfectly unobjectionable. But historicists do not present them as such; they do not see that there is necessarily a plurality of interpretations which are fundamentally on the same level of both suggestiveness and arbitrariness (even though some of them may be distinguished by their fertility – a point of some importance). Instead, they present them as doctrines or theories, asserting that 'all history is the history of class struggle', etc. And if they actually find that their point of view is fertile, and that many facts can be ordered and interpreted in this light, then they mistake this for a confirmation, or even for a proof, of their doctrine.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 140

A change in the conditions of change

The poverty of historicism, we might say, is a poverty of imagination. The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems that the historicist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 120

The central mistake of historicism

This, we may say, is the central mistake of historicism. Its 'laws of development' turn out to be absolute trends; trends which, like laws, do not depend on initial conditions, and which carry us irresistibly in a certain direction into the future. They are the basis of unconditional prophecies, as opposed to conditional scientific predictions.

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 118

I can see only one emergency following upon another

Men have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. [...] I can see only one emergency following upon another [...], only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations.

H. A. L. Fisher, quoted in Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics, 2002) p. 100

We manufacture realities

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the colour of our notions about what we do know: if we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread that we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that's how all of life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but also a table.We sit down at the table, not at the pinetree. Although love is a sexual instinct, we do not love with that instinct, rather we presuppose the existence of another feeling, and that presupposition is, effectively, another feeling.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 53

Civilization is an education of nature

Only people who wear clothes find the naked body beautiful. The overriding value of modesty for sensuality is that it acts as a brake on energy. Artificiality is a way of enjoying naturalness. What I enjoyed about these vast fields I enjoyed because I don't live here. Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom. Civilization is an education of nature. The artificial provides an approach to the natural. What we must never do, however, is mistake the artificial for the natural. In the harmony between the natural and the artificial lies the essence of the superior human soul.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 52

To live is to be other

To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday's lost life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 48

Nostalgia!

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 6