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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.

A. J. Jacobs

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A. J. Jacobs
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: March 20
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
AJ Jacobs
Arnold Steven Jacobs
Jr.
Honey K Balani
Honey K. Balani
A.J. Jacobs
A J Jacobs
Arnold Stephen Jacobs
Jr.
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More quotes by A. J. Jacobs

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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?
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.
A. J. Jacobs
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The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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I know that you should always say yes to adventures or you'll lead a very dull life.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.'?
A. J. Jacobs
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In trying to avoid one sin I've committed another.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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Very few people changed the world by sitting on their couch.
A. J. Jacobs
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Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It's like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.
A. J. Jacobs
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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.
A. J. Jacobs
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I was what they call 'skinny fat' - a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.
A. J. Jacobs
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If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”
A. J. Jacobs
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I grew up in a very secular home with no religion at all, so I was starting from zero.
A. J. Jacobs
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I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.
A. J. Jacobs