Ada Lovelace Quotes

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

There'll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.

Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.

It's like Scott Wolf, I never thought he looked like Tom Cruise until somebody said it and now that they've said it, I see it every time I look at him!

Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to 'what is,' whether it's the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity - what I call 'I see, therefore it is.'

It comes to pass that men do so magnify their own opinions, and are as censorious of any that differ from them in lesser things

Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.

Imagine listening to Beethoven with the prepossession that C is a good note and F a bad one; yet this is exactly the stand point from which all uninitiates contemplate the universe. Obviously, they miss the music.

One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare

I'm the worst critic about music myself. I hardly ever, every like something the first time I listen to it. So I've got to put myself in other people's shoes.

Once you train an audience to look for significance, they start to find it everywhere.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

No one indeed believes anything unless he has first thought that it it to be believed.

It many times falls out that we deem ourselves much deceived in others because we first deceived ourselves.

You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

In discussing these exceptions from the course of nature, the first question is, whether the fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected.

Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn't see when you watched a game

Do you call the jewel blind, because your eye is?