Top 80 A.J. Jacobs Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.”

— A.J. Jacobs

52. “Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.”

— A.J. Jacobs

53. “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.”

— A.J. Jacobs

54. “Remember, sometimes you have to look beyond the weirdness. It’s like the temple in ancient Jerusalem. If you went there, you’d see oxen being slaughtered and all sorts of things. But look beyond the weirdness, to what it means.”

— A.J. Jacobs

55. “As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins’s book?”

— A.J. Jacobs

56. “Greenberg tells me, “Never blame a text from the Bible for your behavior. It’s irresponsible. Anybody who says X, Y, and Z is in the Bible – it’s as if one says, ‘I have no role in evaluating this.’” The.”

— A.J. Jacobs

57. “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.”

— A.J. Jacobs

58. “Here’s why I’m a fan of thanking our lucky stars every day: it helps with forgiving yourself your failures; it cuts down on celebrity worship and boosts humility; and, perhaps most important, it makes us more compassionate.”

— A.J. Jacobs

59. “I’m not a big scatology fan, unlike my sons, who can amuse themselves for an entire afternoon by repeating the phrase ‘crocodile fart.’ So I’ll spare you from an overabundance of detail in this chapter. This chapter will be somewhat soft focus, like the TV camera in a Barbra Streisand interview.”

— A.J. Jacobs

60. “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.”

— A.J. Jacobs

61. “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.”

— A.J. Jacobs

62. “Behavior shapes emotions.”

— A.J. Jacobs

63. “For most of my life, I’ve been working under the paradigm that my behavior should, ideally, have a logical basis. But if you live biblically, this is not true. I have to adjust my brain to this. You.”

— A.J. Jacobs

64. “The Bible is so strange, so utterly bizarre, no human brain could have come up with it.”

— A.J. Jacobs

65. “As her head rests on her pillow, she’ll go through the alphabet from A to Z and try to think of something to be grateful for that starts with each letter – A for her husband Andrew’s blueberry pancakes; B for bocce, her favorite game in the summer; etc.”

— A.J. Jacobs

66. “Studies show that the more you pay attention to your body’s statistics, the greater the chance you’ll adopt a healthy lifestyle. This idea underpins the Quantified Self movement, in which adherents track everything from caloric output to selenium levels. The mere act of weighing yourself daily makes it more likely you’ll shed pounds, according to a University of Minnesota study. Keeping a food journal makes you eat fewer fatty foods, according to another study. And pedometers make you walk more.”

— A.J. Jacobs

67. “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 room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I’d never come close to communing with the divine.”

— A.J. Jacobs

68. “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 many agnostics and atheists out there slinging mashed potatoes at other soup kitchens. I know the world is full of selfless secular gropus like Doctors without Borders. But I’ve got to say: It’s a lot easier to do good if you put your faith in a book that requires you to do good.”

— A.J. Jacobs

69. “It’s joyous,” he says. “If I save someone from breaking a commandment, it gives me a little high.” He pumps his fist. “I never took drugs, but I imagine this is what it feels like.”

— A.J. Jacobs

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

— A.J. Jacobs

71. “You cannot stop religion from evolving.”

— A.J. Jacobs

72. “My growing collection of facts keeps overlapping with my life.”

— A.J. Jacobs

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

— A.J. Jacobs

74. “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.”

— A.J. Jacobs

75. “You tell them you have a hunger and a thirst. You don’t sit at the same table but you have a hunger and a thirst.”

— A.J. Jacobs

76. “The outer affects the inner.”

— A.J. Jacobs

77. “The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas – but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred.”

— A.J. Jacobs

78. “I was smart enough to know that I shouldn’t tell anyone the reason I needed that icy air. No need to spill the secret that I was the genius of all geniuses, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 1980s. That would just inspire envy and skepticism. So I’d just stare at the closed window and stew. If ten minutes went by without my lungs getting fresh air, I panicked. I needed to make sure the monoxide hadn’t eaten my cranium.”

— A.J. Jacobs

79. “Like God and Duane Reade drugstores, toxins are everywhere.”

— A.J. Jacobs

80. “When I went to Israel, it was a little disorienting, because there are so many people who look crazy and were dressed like me. There, I was just one of the apocalyptic crowd.”

— A.J. Jacobs

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

— A.J. Jacobs

82. “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.”

— A.J. Jacobs

83. “I love this one in A. J. Jacobs “The Year of Living Bibically”. Jacobs has a Jewish friend living in Wisconsin who tells Jacobs the Jews there refer to themselves as “the frozen chosen”.”

— A.J. Jacobs

84. “When I force myself to utter the awkward phrase, “I am grateful,” I actually start to feel a bit more grateful... It’s basic cognitive behavioral therapy: Behave in a certain way, and your mind will eventually catch up with your actions.”

— A.J. Jacobs

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

— A.J. Jacobs

86. “There are only three things I want you to take away from your Judaism: 1. Love of family. 2. Love of learning. 3. Love of responsibility toward others.”

— A.J. Jacobs

87. “It’s not that my parents badmouthed religion. It’s just that religion wasn’t for us. We lived in the twentieth century, for crying out loud. In our house, spirituality was almost a taboo subject, much like my father’s salary or my sister’s clove-cigarette habit.”

— A.J. Jacobs

88. “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”

— A.J. Jacobs