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

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

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

The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.

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.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

The word ‘arrested,’ this is semantics. This was all arranged in advance. I was voluntarily processed.

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.

The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.

To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life; & thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. I will recur for proof to the days we have lately passed. On these indeed the sun shone brightly.

A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.