Two Quotes I Hadn't Seen Before

Two worthwhile quotations from Larry Coben, a friend of my wife Beth and me, who now is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, having done apparently all he needed to do as an investment banker:

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." -- M. Cartmill

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us." -- Paul Valery, 1895