From 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.' [by I. F. Menabrea with notes by Ada Lovelace], Scientific Memoirs (1843), 3, 722.

I want to put in something about Bernoulli's numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how the implicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head & hands first. Give me the necessary data & formulae.
That brain of mine is something more than merely Mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other etceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards iustead of from mortality). Before ten years are over, the Devil's in it if I haven't sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe.
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 belief has been forced upon me ...
Firstly: Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has ... and intuitive perception of ... things hidden from eyes, ears, & ordinary senses ...
Secondly: my sense reasoning faculties;
Thirdly: my concentration faculty, by which I mean the power not only of throwing my whole energy & existence into whatever I choose, but also of bringing to bear on anyone subject or idea, a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant & extraneous sources...
Well, here I have written what most people would call a remarkably mad letter; & yet certainly one of the most logical, sober-minded, cool, pieces of composition, (I believe), that I ever framed.
This First Child of Mine. In Dorothy Stein (ed.), Ada: A Life and a Legacy (1985), 87.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently ... It is that which feels & discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses... Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things... Imagination too shows what is ... Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
Comment on Babbage's engines.