Explore Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.