I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.
A. J. JACOBSThe 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.
More A. J. Jacobs Quotes
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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.
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Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.
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Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.
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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.
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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.
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I have little shame, no dignity – all in the name of a better cause.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jealousy is a useless, time-wasting emotion that’s eating me alive.
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I grew up in a very secular home with no religion at all, so I was starting from zero.
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My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.
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Since I was relatively new to the Bible, I was surprised by the Old Testament God. He’s wrathful, but at other times, He’s incredibly compassionate. He’s not a one-dimensional figure at all.
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I was what they call ‘skinny fat’ – a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.
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I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.
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Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.
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After a while, if you’re committed, you start to believe in the things in which you’re praying. It’s just cognitive dissonance. You can’t live a completely religious life and not start to have it sink in.
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The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
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Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.
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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.
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One of the interesting things to me is that God grows throughout the Old Testament. He evolves, sort of matures, and becomes kinder.
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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.
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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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Behavior shapes emotions.
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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?
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I thought religion would eventually wither away and we’d all be worshiping at the altar of science.
A. J. JACOBS