Daniel Tammet Quotes

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Feelings Language Literature Math Memories

Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.

Daniel Tammet

Memories, Ideas, Feelings

Daniel Tammet (2009). “Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

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I know from my own experience that there is much more to 'intelligence' than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person's mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

Daniel Tammet

Believe, Numbers, Mind

"Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.scientificamerican.com.

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You don't have to be disabled to be different, because everybody's different.

Daniel Tammet

Peace, Different, Disabled

Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.201, Simon and Schuster

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Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

Daniel Tammet

Math, Numbers, Culture

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I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.

Daniel Tammet

Years, Skills, Long

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I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn’t be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it.

Daniel Tammet

Beautiful, Butterfly, Air

Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

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It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.

Daniel Tammet

Voice, Long, World

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37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.

Daniel Tammet

Sadness, Dark, Numbers

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Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people.

Daniel Tammet

Views, Circles, Ideas

"Thinking in Numbers". Book by Daniel Tammet, 2012.

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We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.

Daniel Tammet

Art, Literature

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I would play with numbers in a way that other kids would play with their friends.

Daniel Tammet

Kids, Play, Numbers

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My autism is a very mild form. It was diagnosed at the age of 25, partly because it wasn't diagnosable as a teenager (this is Asperger's syndrome, specifically). But there were certainly traits within that condition, within the autism spectrum in general, especially at the high functioning end, that I think are best looked at as pluses.

Daniel Tammet

Teenager, Thinking, Autism

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Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

Daniel Tammet

Beautiful, Unique, Symphony

Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.185, Simon and Schuster

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When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.

Daniel Tammet

Math, Thinking, Two

"A genius explains" by Richard Johnson, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2005.

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I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

Daniel Tammet

Heart, Two, Space

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Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

Daniel Tammet

Intuition, Important, Needs

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Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'

Daniel Tammet

Champion, Chess, Great American

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One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity.

Daniel Tammet

Numbers, Years, Long

Daniel Tammet (2012). “Thinking in Numbers: How Maths Illuminates Our Lives”, p.122, Hachette UK

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I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

Daniel Tammet

Thinking, Stupidity, Taxes

"This much I know" by John Hind, www.theguardian.com. January 31, 2009.

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We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

Daniel Tammet

Philosophical, Names, Ideas

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There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.

Daniel Tammet

Average, People, Expectations

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When I was a child, my behavior was far from being what most people would label 'intelligent.' It was often limited, repetitive and anti-social. I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as looking someone in the eye or deciphering a person's body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time.

Daniel Tammet

Children, Eye, Intelligent

"Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.scientificamerican.com.

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The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

Daniel Tammet

Memories, Intelligent, Brain

Daniel Tammet (2009). “Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

Daniel Tammet

Motivation, Inspiration, Shapes

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I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.

Daniel Tammet

Memories, Skills, May

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Born: January 31, 1979
Occupation: Writer
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