Criss Jami Quotes

To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.

~ Criss Jami

If love is blind, then maybe a blind person that loves has a greater understanding of it.

~ Criss Jami

I would rather a romantic relationship turn into contempt than turn into apathy. The passion in the extremities make it appear as though it once meant something. We grow from hot or cold, but lukewarm is the biggest insult.

~ Criss Jami

It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty tent lost somewhere in the desert of self.

~ Criss Jami

Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.

~ Criss Jami

The reality of loving God is loving him like he's a Superhero who actually saved you from stuff rather than a Santa Claus who merely gave you some stuff.

~ Criss Jami

It's not at all hard to understand a person it's only hard to listen without bias.

~ Criss Jami

To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?

~ Criss Jami

You are evidence of your mother's strength, especially if you are a rebellious knucklehead and regardless she has always maintained her sanity.

~ Criss Jami

Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love.

~ Criss Jami

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

~ Criss Jami

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

~ Criss Jami

Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.

~ Criss Jami

To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something, to be inspirational is to be crazy enough to live a little.

~ Criss Jami

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.

~ Criss Jami

I will never deny that life isn't fair. It seems as though when a woman leaves a man she is strong and independent, but when a man leaves a woman he is a pig and a jerk.

~ Criss Jami

Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live.

~ Criss Jami

Tell me that the purpose of life is to have fun, and without a care in the world I'll begin wreaking havoc on everything I pass. Now that's what I call pure, honest fun.

~ Criss Jami

The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.

~ Criss Jami

A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.

~ Criss Jami

The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot.

~ Criss Jami

Confidence is like a dragon where, for every head cut off, two more heads grow back.

~ Criss Jami

With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.

~ Criss Jami

The biggest challenge after success is shutting up about it.

~ Criss Jami

Telling an introvert to go to a party is like telling a saint to go to Hell.

~ Criss Jami

When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.

~ Criss Jami

There's nothing more contagious than the laughter of young children, it doesn't even have to matter what they're laughing about.

~ Criss Jami

Everyone has a sense of humor. If you don't laugh at jokes, you probably laugh at opinions.

~ Criss Jami

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

~ Criss Jami

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

~ Criss Jami

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

~ Criss Jami

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

~ Criss Jami

Question like a child, reason like an adult, and write like a sage.

~ Criss Jami

Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.

~ Criss Jami

A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know.

~ Criss Jami

A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.

~ Criss Jami

Realizing the seriously ruthless, venomous habits and agendas of evil always instills a more fierce passion and longing for a closer God. Men, out of pride, may claim their own authorities over what constitutes good and evil; they may self-proclaim a keen knowledge of subjective morality through religion or science. But that is only if they are acknowledging the work of evil as a cartoon-like, petty little rain cloud in the sky that merely wants to dampen one's spirits. On the contrary, a man could be without a doubt lit with the strength, the peace, and the knowledge of the gods, his gods, but when or if the devils grow weary in unsuccessful attempts to torment him, they begin tormenting his loved ones, or, if not his loved ones, anyone who may attempt to grasp his philosophies. No matter how godly he may become, God is, in the end, his only hope and his only grace for the pressures built around him - it is left up to a higher authority and a more solid peace and a wider love to eclipse not just one's own evils but all evils for goodness to ultimately matter. If all men were gods, each being would dwell in a separate prison cell, hopeless, before finally imploding into nothingness.

~ Criss Jami

God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.

~ Criss Jami

Christianity, like genius, is one of the hardest concepts to forgive. We hear what we want to hear and accept what we want to accept, for the most part, simply because there is nothing more offensive than feeling like you have to re-evaluate your own train of thought and purpose in life. You have to die to an extent in your hunger for faith, for wisdom, and quite frankly, most people aren't ready to die.

~ Criss Jami

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

~ Criss Jami