Ada Lovelace Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind.”

“I wish to add my mite towards expounding and interpreting the Almighty, and his laws and works, for the most effective use of mankind.”

“The ideas which led to the Analytical Engine occurred in a manner wholly independent of any that were connected with the Difference Engine.”

“I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.”

“Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.”

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

“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then, with the fair white wings of imagination, hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”

“I shall, in due time, be a Poet.”

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

“Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perception of some things, which no one else has. I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.”

“I have my hopes, and very distinct ones, too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations.”

“In the case of the Analytical Engine, we have undoubtedly to lay out a certain capital of analytical labour in one particular line, but this is in order that the engine may bring us in a much larger return in another line.”

“I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion.”

“Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things.”

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

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

“I think I am more determined than ever in my future plans, and I have quite made up my mind that nothing must be suffered to interfere with them.”

“I am never so happy as when I am really engaged in good earnest, and it makes me most wonderfully cheerful and merry at other times.”

“The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere "calculating machines." It holds a position wholly its own.”

“The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.”

“I was rather foolish in saying that I did not like arithmetic. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.”

“The curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies.”