The quote database

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

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.

The ancient republics absorbed the individual in the state--prescribed his religion and controlled his activity.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

Hence the necessity that he should have been well trained in habits, who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and moral philosophy generally.

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.

By space the Universe encompasses and swallows me as an atom, by thought I encompass it.

There is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women

The point is, that we want to be constantly on the lookout for ways of improving whatever work we are engaged in, whether that work be milking cows or doing something else.

You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.

There is an indescribable something about work with the hands that tends to develop a student's mind.

No one gets much out of life who does not make his education a real, vital part of himself.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.

Although our intellect always feels itself urged towards clearness and certainty, still our mind often feels itself attracted by uncertainty.

Thus the Analytical Engine will possess a library of its own. Every set of cards once made will at any future time reproduce the calculations for which it was first arranged.

By the aid of the Mechanical Notation, the Analytical Engine became a reality: for it became susceptible of demonstration.

Moreover, the many dead trunks that stand like skeletons, never fail to give to these primeval woods a character of solemnity, absent in those of countries long civilized.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

Sitting down on a block of granite, it was delightful to watch the various insects and birds as they flew past.

As the racial distinction of humanity lies in its social relation, so we find the distinctive gains and losses of humanity to lie also in its social relation. We are more affected by our relation to each other than by our physical environment.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best.

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.

To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to organize it is another step.