Ada Lovelace Quotes

“I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild.”

“Those who are much in earnest and with single minds devoted to any great object in life, must find this occasionally inevitable.”

“Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics.”

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

“I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.”

“The engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

“The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number.”

“A uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.”

“The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.”

“I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst.”

“If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me poetical science?”

“What is Imagination? It is the Combining Faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations.”

“It seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, and hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition.”

“We talk much of Imagination. We talk of the Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists; I am inclined to think that in general we don't know very exactly what we are talking about.”

“No one knows what almost awful energy and power lie yet undeveloped in that wiry little system of mine.”

“It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine.”

“Many persons imagine that because the business of the engine is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error.”

“The bounds of arithmetic were however outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred.”

“I hope to bequeath to the generations a Calculus of the Nervous System.”

“Those who view mathematical science, not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race.”

“I am working very hard for you; like the Devil in fact (which perhaps I am).”

“It is that which feels and discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses.”

“Mathematics constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world.”

“We may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis.”

“The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols.”