True, it [geometry] does not bestow imagination, a delicate flower blossoming none knows how and unable to thrive on every soil; but it arranges what is confused, thins out the dense, calms the tumultuous, filters the muddy and gives lucidity, a superior product to all the tropes of rhetoric.

Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The Life of the Fly, Chapter XII (p. 289), Dodd, Mead & Co. 1925