Top 84 A.J. Jacobs Quotes of All time - Quotes.Pub

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I thought that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world.

My goal? To test out every diet and exercise regimen on planet earth and figure out which work best. I sweated, I cooked, I learned to pole dance. In the end, I lost weight, lowered my cholesterol and doubled my energy level. I feel better than I ever have.

I love this one in A. J. Jacobs “The Year of Living Bibically”. Jacobs has a Jewish friend living in Wisconsin who tells Jacobs the Jews there refer to themselves as “the frozen chosen”.

Think of negative speech as verbal pollution. And that’s what I’ve been doing: visualizing insults and gossip as a dark cloud, maybe one with some sulfur dioxide. Once you’ve belched it out, you can’t take it back. As grandma said, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. The interesting this is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place.

When I went to Israel, it was a little disorienting, because there are so many people who look crazy and were dressed like me. There, I was just one of the apocalyptic crowd.

When I force myself to utter the awkward phrase, “I am grateful,” I actually start to feel a bit more grateful... It’s basic cognitive behavioral therapy: Behave in a certain way, and your mind will eventually catch up with your actions.

Like God and Duane Reade drugstores, toxins are everywhere.

The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.

I was smart enough to know that I shouldn’t tell anyone the reason I needed that icy air. No need to spill the secret that I was the genius of all geniuses, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 1980s. That would just inspire envy and skepticism. So I’d just stare at the closed window and stew. If ten minutes went by without my lungs getting fresh air, I panicked. I needed to make sure the monoxide hadn’t eaten my cranium.

My growing collection of facts keeps overlapping with my life.

The outer affects the inner.

Taking the Bible too literally is a mistake. It should be read as a guidebook of wisdom and insight.

The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas – but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

You tell them you have a hunger and a thirst. You don’t sit at the same table but you have a hunger and a thirst.

You cannot stop religion from evolving.

There’s almost always a church youth group at the soup kitchen. I have yet to see an atheists’ youth group. Yeah, I know, religious people don’t have a monopoly on doing good. I’m sure that there are many agnostics and atheists out there slinging mashed potatoes at other soup kitchens. I know the world is full of selfless secular gropus like Doctors without Borders. But I’ve got to say: It’s a lot easier to do good if you put your faith in a book that requires you to do good.

I think there’s something to the idea that the divine dwells more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought, more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I’d never come close to communing with the divine.

Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.

It’s joyous,” he says. “If I save someone from breaking a commandment, it gives me a little high.” He pumps his fist. “I never took drugs, but I imagine this is what it feels like.

A few weeks later, I’m in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I’m sitting next to a guy who’s doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we’re about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He’s neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he’s not a genius.

Behavior shapes emotions.

Greenberg tells me, “Never blame a text from the Bible for your behavior. It’s irresponsible. Anybody who says X, Y, and Z is in the Bible – it’s as if one says, ‘I have no role in evaluating this.’” The.

Studies show that the more you pay attention to your body’s statistics, the greater the chance you’ll adopt a healthy lifestyle. This idea underpins the Quantified Self movement, in which adherents track everything from caloric output to selenium levels. The mere act of weighing yourself daily makes it more likely you’ll shed pounds, according to a University of Minnesota study. Keeping a food journal makes you eat fewer fatty foods, according to another study. And pedometers make you walk more.

As her head rests on her pillow, she’ll go through the alphabet from A to Z and try to think of something to be grateful for that starts with each letter – A for her husband Andrew’s blueberry pancakes; B for bocce, her favorite game in the summer; etc.

The Bible is so strange, so utterly bizarre, no human brain could have come up with it.

For most of my life, I’ve been working under the paradigm that my behavior should, ideally, have a logical basis. But if you live biblically, this is not true. I have to adjust my brain to this. You.

After decimating several vegetables, I decide juicing is my favorite form of food preparation. There’s something perversely appealing about subjecting an innocent plant to that much violence.

I’m not a big scatology fan, unlike my sons, who can amuse themselves for an entire afternoon by repeating the phrase ‘crocodile fart.’ So I’ll spare you from an overabundance of detail in this chapter. This chapter will be somewhat soft focus, like the TV camera in a Barbra Streisand interview.

I’m still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I’m now a reverant agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It’s possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn’t take away from its power or importance.

My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It’s far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y’all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip.

Here’s why I’m a fan of thanking our lucky stars every day: it helps with forgiving yourself your failures; it cuts down on celebrity worship and boosts humility; and, perhaps most important, it makes us more compassionate.

As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins’s book?

Remember, sometimes you have to look beyond the weirdness. It’s like the temple in ancient Jerusalem. If you went there, you’d see oxen being slaughtered and all sorts of things. But look beyond the weirdness, to what it means.

Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.

I was very good at sitting. But I just read so much research about how horrible sitting is for you. It’s like, it’s really bad. It’s like Paula-Deen-glazed-bacon-doughnut bad. So I now move around as much as possible.

Very few people changed the world by sitting on their couch.

Mrs. Bush answers: “I think you ought to treat your spouse like you treat your friends. You clean your house for your friends, you make sure they’re taken care of. A spouse often comes second. So treat your spouse like the friends. Don’t just go halfway. If each spouse goes seventy-five percent of the way, it’s a perfect match.

Behavior shapes beliefs.

I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.

Pain is annoying and unnecessary, like getting an e-mail in all caps. It’s like a six-year-old who alerts you every fifteen seconds that he wants Hungry Hungry Hippos for his birthday. Yes, I understand. Message received.

I’ve rarely said the word “Lord,” unless it’s followed by “of the Rings.

I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity. I know you’d better focus on the good stuff or you’re screwed.

I love it when the Bible gives Emily Post-like tips that are both wise and easy to follow.

Its sort of my job to feel good.

I was what they call ‘skinny fat’ – a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.

The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I’d like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.

Ezekiel and his fellow prophets have become my heroes. They were fearless. They literalized metaphors. They turned their lives into protest pieces. They proved that, in the name of truth, sometimes you can’t be afraid to take a left turn from polite society and look absurd.

The Bible talks a lot about thankfulness, and I’m more thankful than I ever was. I try to concentrate on the hundreds of things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four that go wrong.

I know that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing – but they do live in the same neighborhood. I know once again, firsthand, the joy of learning.

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