“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.

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

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

Does it mean this, does it mean that that’s all anybody wants to know? I’d say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it’s there!

To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.

I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.