A.J. Jacobs Quotes

The strange fact that out of millions of people in the world, your mother and father met and decided to get married to each other. And out of the millions of sperm, that the one with your genes was th...

I like uncovering the cultural prejudices I didn't even know.

G-rated language is making me a less angry person. Behavior shapes emotion.

Each cherry took about three seconds to eat. Three seconds to eat, but at least five years in the making. It seemed unfair to the hard-working cherry tree. The least I could do was to devote my attent...

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 ro...

I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English.

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...

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'm Jewish in the way Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.

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...

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...

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

Maybe taming my tongue will be good for me in the end. But it's pretty hard when you've got a world filled with idiots from Drunkopolis.

The author jokes that the culture at his first job at Entertainment Weekly chased away the worthwhile aspects of his Brown education, but in so doing he makes a subtle point about the profound impact...

Leonardo Pisano, aka Fibonacci: Fibonacci was a 13th-century Italian mathematician who invented the Fibonacci series, which goes like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each of the numbers is the su...

My growing collection of facts keeps overlapping with my life.

First impressions are like South American dictators: overly powerful and unreliable.

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

When I get it home and start to read it, the first thing I notice is that Warren has copyrighted the phrase Purpose-driven. It has a little ® after it. This makes me angry. Did Jesus copyright Turn th...

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