Thought is perhaps no more than a whim of Nature, who has bestowed it on a single species, as she bestowed on the rare or extinct mammals we see in our museums their absurd antlers: weapons or ornaments so curiously outspread, looped, gnarled,or branching that they are even more perilous than useless to the animal that wears them.
After all—why not? Our heads are cluttered up with speculations and ideas that get caught in the tangles of the forest of hard facts, and keep us in a quandary, proud of our excrescences, and doomed to bell, like rutting stags, our poems and our theories—magniloquent and mortified.— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14
What a piece of work is man: how ingenious in folly, how elaborate in error, how infinite in his capacity to make a simple danger complicated. In reason, how labyrinthine; in apprehension, how confidently mistaken; in action, how divided against himself to invent both the cure and the argument against taking it. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — yet what is this paragon but a creature clever enough to escape superstition and cleverer still at manufacturing new ones, who clears the forest of predators only to catch his antlers in a thicket of his own theories?