Language may be regarded as an old city

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 174-175 

Time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia

In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 142-143

Outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them

Somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed form the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 23-24 

Därför måste det gamla bort

Och det är en människas största lycka att få bygga opp vad hon själv behöver och visa vad hon duger till, och därför måste det gamla bort. Och så tyckte jag mig förstå varför Vår Herre låter riken falla och städer krossas och människoverk bortsopas som löv för vinden. Det får lov att vara så, för att människorna alltid ska ha något att bygga opp och få visa vad de förmår.

Selma Lagerlöf, Jerusalem (III) (Åhlen & Åkerlunds Förlag, 1935), p. 249

A civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments

We can take the original meaning of the word—in late Latin, civilisatio—as a workable starting point; it means “having or establishing settled communities.” A people known to the Romans was civilized if its members lived in civitates, cities or towns. We can generalize this further, and say that a civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments.

John Michael Greer, 'The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part One: Civilization and Barbarism' on The Archdruid Report, URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/07/the-cimmerian-hypothesis-part-one.html (15/07/2015)

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

Love leaves a memory of its weight

Is even the end of us an account? No, don't answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even hezvier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (Faber and Faber, 1974) p. 182