A. J. Jacobs Quotes
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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.
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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. A Stanford study showed that those who saw a photo of their future self made smarter financial decisions.
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I pledged to become the world's greatest expert in a field I knew nothing about.
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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 have little shame, no dignity - all in the name of a better cause.
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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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It's sort of my job to feel good.
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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.
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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.
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I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.
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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.
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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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How do you gag the voice in your head that says, 'You don't have to [do it] today. There's always tomorrow.'?
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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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I find placebos uplifting and exhilarating. It means that taking action--no matter what the action is--might help you feel better.
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I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.
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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.
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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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There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful one
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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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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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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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I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.
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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.