“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.”

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?

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.

Time is precious, it is foolish to waste it.

Foolishly hoping you return with a kiss.

A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life, and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do.

Life has its own lesson on our foolishness.

How strange and foolish is man. He looses his health in gaining wealth. Then to regain health he wastes his wealth.

Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless.

All that is great cannot be possessed – and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing. We want to possess.

A little foolishness, enough 2 enjoy life, & a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do.