Quotes by Criss Jami

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

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.

The biggest challenge after success is shutting up about it.

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

When youre the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.

Everyone has a sense of humor. If you dont laugh at jokes, you probably laugh at opinions.

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they dont even need or want to look intelligent anymore.

Whenever I think of something but cant think of what it was I was thinking of, I cant stop thinking until I think Im thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

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.

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe hes 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.

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

Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a childs relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we dont know as much as we think we know.

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

A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but arent quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.

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 ones 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 ones 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.

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.

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 arent ready to die.

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

I cannot encourage any fabrication even for the sake of making people feel good. If I were to fabricate consciously and knowingly, I would not only be ordaining myself their enemy, but also ordaining myself Gods enemy.

Our enemies are quite good for relentlessly keeping us sharp and on our toes. This especially goes for sincere philosophers. They use their enemies to challenge their arguments so that they can know the weak points in their own reasoning and how to argue for and strengthen their position. There are just none like ones enemies to always look for his mistakes and do it harder than anyone else.