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

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 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.

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

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.

Training attention through meditation opens our eyes.

Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we’re adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to their sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

All forms of meditation strengthen & direct our attention through the cultivation of three key skills: concentration, mindfulness & compassion or loving & kindness.

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention.

The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.

If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn’t deplete us to give.