Criss Jami Quotes - Page 11

I claim neither liberalism nor conservatism - one tends to be airheaded while the other tends to be brickheaded.

If you want to know how negative you are, pay attention to how much you hate negativity in other people. Fragile, artificial positivity needs always to be surrounded by more positivity in order to stay positive, but the ability to be positive, happy, and even, at times, appreciative around 'negative people' is the mark of real positivity.

Reality. It is sometimes brought through foreign eyes; because if you do not know any better, you cannot see the worse (and vice versa).

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

Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.

If ever you feel like an animal among men, be a lion.

Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly.

Reason begets honesty, and honesty, if given its head, begets confidence; so consequently, there is a sort of grand authority in the stances of those who know why they are standing.

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

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.

Faithfulness imparts God's reason for all circumstances. No matter what the world says, losing is no longer an option.

When emerging from humble beginnings, those around you tend to underestimate your authenticity because they knew you before you were 'somebody'.

The hated man is the result of his hater's pride rather than his hater's conscience.

Hopefully, when your actions and deeds - and therefore other people - boast for you, you're made tired of hearing it, too, from your own mouth because if not, all could lose sight of those actions and deeds behind the gong of your boasting.

Silence might be a shout for the truth. It might be the speech that someday, in its truest, most uncontaminated, unadulterated state, all will be revealed.

Never rebel for the sake of rebelling, but always rebel for the sake of truth.

The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the breath of a living love knowing when to protect, when to release, and when to protect again. For we are the products of an active love - the Father the creator, the Son the perfecter, the Spirit the supervisor - but just like in a factory, to deny the process is to ultimately create a defect of oneself.

How easy it is for so many of us today to be undoubtedly full of information yet fully deprived of accurate information.

The artist is often misunderstood because, stepping outside himself and holding most details in great tension, he's about as complex as a shape-shifter; or a head with faces on all sides, but not necessarily in the negative connotation as one being two-faced usually implies. For instance, to be misunderstood can mean to be improperly deemed a troublemaker when that is not one's true intent: you see, to troublemakers, the artist knows that the peacemaker may seem like a troublemaker; therefore he may, whether in honesty or in jest, at times, present himself as a troublemaker for perceptual, artistic flair. But then to the artless peacemakers, because of this they will interpret him as a troublemaker. This is why the artist has so few allies. To the troublemakers he's a troublemaker, yet still the peacemakers a troublemaker.

Tolerance is not infinite patience, but slain patience; patience that has lost its hope and love and has thrown in the towel.

Christians sometimes make themselves into elephants afraid of mice. You have the Creator of the universe on your side; not to mention, you've been given eternal life. 'Whom or what shall you fear?' To be afraid of anything other than God himself is like an insult to God.

On athleticism, God knows no favor. It seems rather he is in the business of teaching winners how to lose and losers how to win.

The humble ones are always learning and improving, and their secret is always that it's a secret.

I believe in evolution in the sense that a short-tempered man is the successor of a crybaby.

It is ignorance that is at times incomprehensible to the wise; for instance, he may not see 'the positive person' or 'the negative person' in such a black and white way as many people do. A wise man may not understand it because, as a catalyst of wisdom, but not always wise in his own eyes, even he can learn from and give back to fools. To think that an individual has absolutely nothing to offer to the table is counter-intuitively what the wise man considers to be 'the ignorance of hopelessness'.

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative in negative. Or as Paul the Apostle wrote, 'I have learned the secret to contentment in any and every circumstance.' He was right. Indeed the Lord is our strength, especially under the commandment to love one another. Otherwise we are nothing and easily thrown about by both our own and other people's mind control in a painful, mental, physical desperation to run from every thought, every thing, and every one not seeming so positive or immediately beneficial to us.

I never feel unsafe except for when the majority is on my side.

Any coward can be a peacekeeper! In fact, that comes to one naturally. But they are blessed, the peacemakers...and all those who know the difference.

Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.

Self-awareness - the commendable ability to be yourself without being a nuisance to someone else.

Where everyone wants to be a leader, it makes one a follower to want to be a leader, and a leader to know what to follow.

As followers of Christ, we are to be careful not to remain victims of the many cultural presuppositions of who he is, and what he teaches, insofar as taking for granted our own caricatures of him. Let it boil in both mind and heart the question, 'If Jesus were to appear today, how many of us would actually recognize him and his teachings (or would it simply be a recount of his first visit)?

One of the biggest contradictions in self-proclaimed open-mindedness is to say that we're all one but when a true bigot comes around tell him we're all different. It's usually the case that neither side is correct. One might have the right to do something, anything, but sure enough, that doesn't mean it's right and a benefit to other people.

There's sometimes a tugging feeling you get to push further when you aren't being challenged enough or when things get too comfortable.

Misguided good men are more dangerous than honest bad men. It is because they are seen as good that, in and by good conscience, the mob will always, stubbornly back them without question.

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.

Character that is fruit-producing can be summed up in the mastery of these 5 qualities: morals, but a sense of humor; love, but respect for criticism; intelligence without pretense; humility without self-loathing; and a mind open, but with solid convictions.

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.

Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision.

Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned of what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him, however with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality.

So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.

Tolerance! The virtue that makes one bite his tongue so that he can tear out his hair.

The hype cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration.

God is so omnipotent yet man so impotent, the Divine masterpiece was not even in creating the universe, but in making sin boring to sinners.

It often seems as though the silent, humble servant is secretly wiser and more discerning than the haughty master; yet through dutiful (and sometimes insecure) surrender he continues to serve and carry out petty orders in loyal acquiescence.

If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you

To believe in the truth of Christ is to be introduced to another form of hatred, and that is not sharing Him.

A spirit ushered by false teachings is like a body nourished by sweets. The adult, as opposed to the child, will come to understand reasons one cannot live a healthy existence on nothing but candy; so likewise, the Christian must come to understand that one cannot know and love the will of God under false doctrine.

My heart goes out to some of those rather hostile yet highly intelligent individuals who may see problems really because they have solutions. That hostility is learned in defense; not offense. An often stubborn and prideful world, in its self-destructive, temporary bliss of ignorance, may be violently resistant to the watchful mind.

It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere fantasy.

God favors men and women who delight in being made worthy of happiness before the happiness itself.

A part of me genuinely wanted to be the worst because I was so sick of everyone fighting to be the best.

Man was created to glorify God. Now, that may encompass other things which God has planned for each man, but essentially, man was created to glorify God.

God speaks of his children shining best in ways that only he can provide. The heavens lift one as a golden child while the flesh lowers one to a child with gold.

The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. Hence by the public they are either admired for their creativity or, even more commonly so, detested for disturbing the daily peace of mind.

I've finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed

You think you're losing your mind, but do keep in mind, as long as you may, that the ability to go on thinking such a thing means it's not all gone.

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