Daniel Tammet Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Daniel Tammet quote about:
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“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.”
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“I feel traveling certainly does broaden the mind. In my case certainly I feel more confident. It gives you a new perspective on the world.”
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“I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'”
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“I would play with numbers in a way that other kids would play with their friends.”
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“I'm not sure I'm the only savant with high IQ or with an above average IQ. Again, it may just be that we don't know very many of the others.”
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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 -
“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.”
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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.”
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“Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.”
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“I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.”
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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.”
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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.”
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“From 'Embracing the Wide Sky', I went to the States, to Canada and to different parts of Europe as well. I gave interviews in several languages.”
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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 -
“I certainly have routines in my day-to-day life that are important to me and still give me feelings of security and control, but the capacity to break out of them every so often as I travel has given me a second wind.”
-- Daniel Tammet -
“I did have a very restricted, regimented life. There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders.”
-- Daniel Tammet -
“I have tried to be more flexible, but I always end up feeling more uncomfortable. Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.”
-- Daniel Tammet -
“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 -
“I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.”
-- Daniel Tammet -
“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.”
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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 -
“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 -
“I remember as a young child, during one of my frequent trips to the local library, spending hours looking at book after book trying in vain to find one that had my name on it. Because there were so many books in the library, with so many different names on them, I’d assumed that one of them—somewhere—had to be mine. I didn’t understand at the time that a person’s name appears on a book because he or she wrote it. Now that I’m twenty-six I know better. If I were ever going to find my book one day, I was going to have to write it.”
-- Daniel Tammet -
“Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.”
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“I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.”
-- Daniel Tammet -
“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 -
“My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers - to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response - for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead.”
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“When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.”
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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