A. J. Jacobs Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Recent studies have shown that our creativity is increased by 60% when we're walking. I encourage my workshop participants to write at their desks but think on their feet.
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Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
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I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.
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Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.
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One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good - he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad - he and the world is destroyed.
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I used to sit in front of McDonald's and ask people for dollars to get me a cheeseburger. It was bad.
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When the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low.
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Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.
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The best government is the least government. In some areas, I'm libertarian. I don't subscribe to any one party; they are all bad.
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I've been pretty lucky with neighbors. But back in 1998, I lived, like, literally next door to Wrigley Field in Chicago. And I had, like, 50,000 bad neighbors spread out over the course of one summer. I'm a diehard Cubs fan, but living right next to the ballpark, it's just - as you're trying to go to sleep, you can just, like, hear urination.
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Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.
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Music is very powerful and can make you feel whatever it is. If you listen to gospel, you're going to feel thankful, and you're going to want to call up people that you hate and tell them that you love them. When you listen to sexual music, it gets you in the mood.
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I do get recognized, but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you're well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people, and I also think they're used to seeing me walking around, so I don't think I'm a very big deal.
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Any art communicates what you're in the mood to receive.
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I think if you're fame-hungry, go out to a nightclub and get drunk... why do that? I don't understand how some people would want fame so bad that they'd go out and get negative attention to earn it.
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I love a good fight and I think a bad fight can ruin a movie. I really do.
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I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
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A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle.
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If you have bad hair and you bite your nails, nobody expects that you can't direct plays.
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A mood disorder is dangerous. You've got to get those dramatic waves of highs and lows stabilized. It's dangerous if you don't.
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We live in a world where there are dangerous people, there are bad people.
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[a story he told fans each year at the Delaware County (OH) Fair Little Brown Jug Stakes for pacers, which as a devoted harness-racing fan he attended annually] I grew up in the city not far from a burlesque theater and my father cautioned me not to go there because I might see something I shouldn't see. So, of course, when I got old enough I went right in, and sure enough I saw something I shouldn't - my father!
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My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.
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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.
