A. J. Jacobs Quotes

I'm all for cafeteria religion. I think there's nothing wrong with cafeterias - I've had some great meals at cafeterias. I've also had some horrible meals, so it's important to pick the right things. Take a heaping helping of compassion and mercy, and leave the intolerance on the table.

It's a different way of looking at the world. Your life isn't about rights. It's about responsibilities."--Mr Bill Berkowitz

I've rarely said the word "Lord," unless it's followed by "of the Rings.

Sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in.

The World Health Organization ... estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution.

I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.

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

More people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving.

A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. This, over the years, can cause real cardiovascular damage.

Jealousy is a useless, time-wasting emotion that's eating me alive.

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 was what they call 'skinny fat' - a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.

I love to live things, so I wanted to immerse myself and get into the mindset - and sandals - of my forefathers.

It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?

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

One of the interesting things to me is that God grows throughout the Old Testament. He evolves, sort of matures, and becomes kinder.

Behavior shapes beliefs.

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

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.

Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It's like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.

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.

Its sort of my job to feel good.

This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.

Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.

There's a lot of food restriction in the Bible, but it does say you're allowed to eat crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts. I decided to take advantage of that and eat a cricket. It was chocolate-covered, and I'm not sure that's the way they were served in Moses' time. But this was a rule that seemed crazy on the outside, then actually turned out to be pragmatic and compassionate.

The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.

I thought religion would eventually wither away and we'd all be worshiping at the altar of science.

Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.

There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful one

Plus, in one of his e-mails, the guy said he didn't like pancakes. What kind of asshole doesn't like pancakes?

I've started to look at life differently. When you're thanking God for every little you - every meal, every time you wake up, every time you take a sip of water - you can't help but be more thankful for life itself, for the unlikely and miraculous fact that you exist at all.

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

I know that you should always say yes to adventures or you'll lead a very dull life.

I found there were things about religion that I really loved; things like the sense of gratefulness that it brings.

There's a very passionate pro-chewing movement on the Internet called Chewdiasm. They say that we should be chewing 50 to 100 times per mouthful, which is insane. I tried that. It takes like a day and a half to eat a sandwich. But their basic idea is right. If you chew, you'll eat slower and you will get more nutrients.

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.

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.

A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses.

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.

I don't believe that prayers actually change God's mind - if there is a God - but I liked praying for people in need. It was like moral weightlifting. I tend to be self-obsessed, and it was nice to get out of my brain once in a while.

I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.

I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

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.

It's hard to be in a bad mood when you're walking around looking like you're about to play the semifinals at Wimbledon.

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.

The key to making healthy decisions is to respect your future self. Honor him or her. Treat him or her like you would treat a friend or a loved one.

I’d recommend learning to accept rejection. Become friends with rejection. Be nice to rejection, because it’s a huge part of being a writer, no matter where you are in your career.

I have little shame, no dignity – all in the name of a better cause.