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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

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Daniel Tammet
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: January 31
Computer Scientist
Esperantist
Poet
Writer
London
England
Daniel Paul Corney
Think
Voltaire
Thinking
Lottery
Life
Specifically
Described
Stupidity
Played
Taxes
Never
Lotteries

More quotes by Daniel Tammet

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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
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I'm inconsistent because I'm human.
Daniel Tammet
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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.
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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.
Daniel Tammet
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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
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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
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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.
Daniel Tammet
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Daniel Tammet
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I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.
Daniel Tammet
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Daniel Tammet
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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
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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
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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