Ada Lovelace

It may be desirable to explain, that by the word operation, we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may.

Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations...

In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.

It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

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

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans—every thing in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

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 owe to you some of the most philosophical and poetical of my pursuits and pleasures.

I am never so happy as when I am really engaged in good earnest; & it makes me must wonderfully cheerful & merry at other times, which is a great victory.

My mind is something more than a mere abstract machine.

Religion to me is science, and science is religion.

I shall, in due time, be a poet.

I have a peculiar way of learning, & I think it must be a peculiar man to teach me successfully.

I hope to bequeath to the generations a calculus of the nervous system.

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...

The more I see of that man, the less I understand him.

I am much delighted at getting your note just now. I was thinking of you & wishing for you.

I am doggedly attacking and sifting to the very bottom, all the ways of deducing the Bernoulli Numbers.

I want to put in something about Bernoulli's Numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how an explicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head and hands first.

I am quite thunderstruck by the power of the writing. It is especially unlike a woman's style surely; but neither can I compare it with any man's exactly.