Quotes by Criss Jami

The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of peoples perception of you rather than peoples perception of you.

Confidence turns into pride only when you are in denial of your mistakes.

The Christian should never have to put others down in order to feel good about himself. Instead, he can simply check out the medias insistent portrayal of Christianity and feel grateful that he isnt as deceived as the masses who really swallow the garbage. Ignorance is ultimately how people put themselves down, and the mere Christian who knows what entails the mere Christian is ultimately free from such.

My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

It is a noble responsibility to not back down when you know that you know that you know that you are right.

The pressure of adversity is the most powerful sustainer of accountability. Its as though everything you do is multiplied by 50 in order to surpass those with a head-start. I was never capable of slacking when at the threshold of failure.

Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire.

The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesnt sin but wants to sin.

Heresy would like to think of itself as invented Truth. But of course, all Reason and Logic would agree that no man can ever create Truth; he can only discover it. If heresy were ever at all beneficial, God would use it really to bring one right back to Truth, as countless inventions have brought men to discovery.

Its okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.

Some peoples theologies come across as blatantly wrong when weighed against what is revealed in Scripture. However God has mercy on those who may be wrong but genuinely seek understanding before seeking themselves.

We live in an age so legalistic, we find it hard to imagine someone wanting to obey their Lord simply because they love their God.

If you are not there for other people, do not expect them to be there for you. In many a case one might conclude that this is part of Gods sovereign justice. His grace, however, is that He Himself will always be there for you, no matter what.

What we fail to realize is we often become like Pharisees in our ruthless attempts to identify Pharisees (and impostors). While indeed some people use the old laws of religious pride to tear down men of God, others use the new laws of anti-religious anger to tear down men of God.

It is neither just the religious, the spiritual, the power-hungry, the evil, the ignorant, the corrupt, the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Jew, nor the atheist that makes a hypocrite, but being a human being. Any man who thinks himself to be free of hypocrisy while committed to cherry-picking others for such, I am confident, the Almighty can prove to him a great deal of his own hypocrisy even beyond his earthly comprehension.

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: mans lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness.

The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity.

The worst evil is that most subtle evil. It is the evil that is merely base which is more evil than evil itself. For it is the one closest to righteousness, the one indistinguishable and doused in virtue.

They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice.

Perhaps it is true that, by some definitions, Satan is more religious than God. Many of the particularly proud sinners are deceived into thinking that Satan is anti-religious, that he likes seeing people do immoral things simply because he likes immoral things. Doubtful; Satan likes for people to do immoral things so that he can blame them for doing immoral things. The Father of Lies laughs not with his teammates, but at them.