A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Better Circle Considered Empathy Expand Help Ideas Liberating Like Literature Make Mathematical Numbers Our Parochial People Point Point Of View Properly Single Tyranny Us View Works

Quote Author

Daniel Tammet
English - Novelist
Born: January 31, 1979

Everybody have equal rights to a life of full flourishing. Philosophy slowly, slowly has given us arguments saying, look, you already committed to your own life flourishing, and you're being inconsistent if you don't expand it. So philosophy often works in trying to show us that there's an inner incoherence in our points of view. We're all committed to one thing when it comes to us and our own kind, but we're not willing to expand it and we're guilty of inconsistency.

Rebecca Goldstein

I feel like human beings can't help but destroy, but if our numbers are small we don't destroy as much as we do when our numbers are this huge and out of control. I wonder, what's the carrying capacity for human beings? When do we get to the point when we can't take it anymore, when it becomes too unpleasant to us just to be here because there's too many of us and there's no solitude anymore.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson

It is easy to make out three areas where scientists will be concentrating their efforts in the coming decades. One is in physics, where leading theorists are striving, with the help of experimentalists, to devise a single mathematical theory that embraces all the basic phenomena of matter and energy. The other two are in biology. Biologists-and the rest of us too-would like to know how the brain works and how a single cell, the fertilized egg cell, develops into an entire organism

Dennis Flanagan

We all must support the arts, as it is our culture. It makes us better people. It makes us happy; it gives us empathy and shows us how to live. It is so important.

Imelda Staunton

Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of ‘them’ & widen the circle of ‘us.

Libba Bray

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder.

Don Winslow

All of us, single or married, are eternally part of some family-someway, somewhere, somehow-and much of our joy in life comes as we correctly recognize and properly develop those family relationships. We come to this earth charged with a mission: to learn to love and serve one another. To best help us accomplish this, God has placed us in families, for he knows that is where we can best learn to overcome selfishness and pride and to sacrifice for others and to make happiness and helpfulness and humility and love the very essence of our character.

John H. Groberg

The arts capture our insecurities, quicken our instincts, guide us through threats. They help us know ourselves. They help us know each other. They help us know better.

Agnes Gund

If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That's exactly the meaning of free lunches- the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire-pg. 241

Dan Ariely

The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough.

Bill Maher

The role of empirical work in informing our philosophical theories, as I see it, is not that it gives us a better view of our folk concepts, but that it gives us a better view of knowledge, and the mind, and so on.

Hilary Kornblith

There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There's no single answer - not even a single starting point. Even the 'teachers' ... don't offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas.

Frances Moore Lappé

We will all, at some point in our lives, fall. Every single one of us. We shouldn't spend our time trying to avoid falling. We should spend it finding someone who will help us up!

Nicole Williams

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

Hugh Howey

Consequential strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest - our family and close friends - often put us into. Through interacting with people who do not know us as well, we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, 'But that's not like you!'