“Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans– everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

I am much pleased to find how very well I stand work & how my powers of attention & continued effort increase.

I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.

As soon as I have got flying to perfection, I have got a scheme about a steam engine.

What is imagination? It is a God-like, a noble faculty. It renders earth tolerable, it teaches us to live, in the tone of the eternal.

I am in a charming state of confusion.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

If you can’t give me poetry, can’t you give me poetical science?

I was rather foolish in saying that I did not like arithmetic and to learn figures when I did – I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.

The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.

Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

I don’t wish to be without my brains, tho’ they doubtless interfere with a blind faith which would be very comfortable.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.

How little do we discover in comparison of those things which now are and forever will be hidden from our sight? The whole of which I am fully persuaded no one will ever be able to dive into, and to explain their causes and effects.

Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.

I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for ones self.

For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.

An experiment disproving a prediction is discovery.

The footsteps of Nature are to be trac’d, not only in her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in endeavouring to avoid our discovery.

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.