Top 40 Daniel Tammet Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Daniel Tammet

2. “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

3. “I love books so much. I’ve read more books than anyone else I know.”

— Daniel Tammet

4. “Often autism is portrayed in the media as a very negative condition, as something that prevents somebody from communicating or from socializing or from being able to have any kind of normal, happy life.”

— Daniel Tammet

5. “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

6. “You don’t have to be disabled to be different, because everybody’s different.”

— Daniel Tammet

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Daniel Tammet

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

— Daniel Tammet

13. “I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.”

— Daniel Tammet

14. “I’m inconsistent because I’m human.”

— Daniel Tammet

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Daniel Tammet

17. “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

18. “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

19. “I changed my name because it didn’t fit with the way I saw myself.”

— Daniel Tammet

20. “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

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

— Daniel Tammet

22. “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

23. “I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his ‘Raindrop Prelude.’”

— Daniel Tammet

24. “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

25. “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.”

— Daniel Tammet

26. “Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’”

— Daniel Tammet

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Gottfried Leibniz wrote that music’s pleasure consisted of “unconscious counting” or an “arithmetical exercise of which we are unaware.”

— Daniel Tammet

30. “My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get it wrong. That’s the beauty of love.”

— Daniel Tammet

31. “What would it be like, a world without snow? I cannot imagine such a place. It would be like a world devoid of numbers. Every snowflake, unique as every number, tells us something about complexity. Perhaps that is why we will never tire of its wonder.”

— Daniel Tammet

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

— Daniel Tammet

33. “Life is going to be complex, and the only way we’re able navigate our way through it at all is by living as best we can and absorbing those experiences and somehow making intuitive responses in future situations that resemble them in some way.”

— Daniel Tammet

34. “I hate textbooks. I hate how they shoehorn even the most incongruous words – like ‘cup’ and ‘bookcase,’ or ‘pencil’ and ‘ashtray’ – onto the same page, and then call it ‘vocabulary.’ In a conversation, the language is always fluid, moving, and you have to move with it. You walk and talk and see where the words come from, and where they should go. It was in this way that I learned to count like a Viking.”

— Daniel Tammet

35. “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.”

— Daniel Tammet

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Daniel Tammet

38. “Change appears to us mysterious because it is invisible. It is impossible to see a tree grow tall or a man grow old, except with the precarious imagination of hindsight. A tree is small, and later it is tall. A man is young, and later he is old. A people are at peace, and later they are at war. In each case, the intermediate states are at once infinitely many and infinitely complex, which is why they exceed our finite perceptions.”

— Daniel Tammet

39. “There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel united with them would be the sense of us having grown up in isolation.”

— Daniel Tammet

40. “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

41. “I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.”

— Daniel Tammet

42. “Like many parents, they equated normality with being happy and productive.”

— Daniel Tammet