Criss Jami quotes:

Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.

This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.

It might come a time to not follow your passion, so to speak, although it must be prioritized. It may be the case that your passion will serve as the medic, your peace of mind, alongside a higher calling, with your higher calling being the point man.

Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.

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.

Truth is not fully explosive, but purely electric. You don't blow the world up with the truth; you shock it into motion.

The wrath of God is never an evil wrath. God gets angry because he loves people like a mother would love her child if someone were to harm it. There is something wrong if the mother never gets angry; it is safe to say that that is the unloving mother.

Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life'; banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.

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.

Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man.

Considering the notion that the spiritual battlefield is infinitely greater than the physical, perhaps God is more willing to bless with a sort of divine ecstasy those who see the devil as the enemy rather than those who see other people as the enemies.

During the flames of controversy, opinions, mass disputes, conflict, and world news, sometimes the most precious, refreshing, peaceful words to hear amidst all the chaos are simply and humbly 'I don't know.

In a society where dirt sells, for every good story told as it is, you will hear the whole of that day's 10 bad stories sensationalized; although in reality, it could be that 100 good deeds happened that day which went unsung.

The love of conflict is most evident when opposing forces join sides to defeat the peacemaker.

Always seek justice, but love only mercy. To love justice and hate mercy is but a doorway to more injustice.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

Peaceful disputes are maintained when men sincerely believe that they are morally, logically correct about the issues at hand. It is when neither side is really certain that wars are instigated.

Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.

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

It's always funny that you can try and try again to steal all your critics' ammo, predict their responses, but no matter what, they'll still have a water gun stashed somewhere.

The spirit of arrogance most definitely makes you shine. It paints a bright red target on your own forehead.

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

I pity the man who praises God only when things go his way.

When it comes to world news, attitude is what marks the distinction between justice and vengeance. Justice is pure, but vengeance brings more ruin.

The problem is politics is made a sport, almost as much a sport as football or baseball. When it comes to politics, adults and politicians do more finger-pointing and play more games than children ever do. Too often are we rooting for the pride of a team rather than the good of the nation.

The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations.

A man who loves others based solely on how they make him feel, or what they do for him, is really not loving others at all - but loving only himself.

We are to give (and take) true love without falling into the narcissistic habit of only trying to take it in.

Nothing frustrates people more than a cocky guy who's still winning.

Some people's 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.

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

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

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.

The self-centered man will always expect nothing but praise. He will hope and expect all incoming criticism to be mere self-projection from the critic because when you're self-centered, self-projection is all you can imagine one can do.

You can be yourself without pursuing yourself. Have you ever seen a dog chase his own tail? He just runs in circles.

When everyone believes they are the life coaches, who are the players?

The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.

Love without humility results in the inclination to act as everyone's parent, humility without love results in the need to be everyone's child, and love with humility results in the desire to be a friend.

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.

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.

There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.

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

It is a healthy approach not to expect persons to turn out precisely how you would have wished.

Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.

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.

The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.

The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.

The unteachable man is sentenced to being taught only by experience. The tragedy is he reaches nothing further than his own pain.

I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.

A sign of power in a man is not only when people follow what he suggests, but also when people make a conscious effort to do the exact opposite of what he suggests.

The love of Christ is always there and unchanging, no matter what we do, but it is when we are obedient that we actually begin to feel it.

Love is without a doubt the laziest theory for the meaning of life, but when it actually comes a time to do it we find just enough energy to over-complicate life again. Any devil can love, whom he himself sees as, a good person who has treated him well, but to love also the polar opposite is what separates love from fickle emotions.

As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.

What is hard work? It takes strength, energy, and stress to truly care about others enough to place oneself last, but it is easy to wrap oneself up and selfishly scramble on the heads of others.

When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough.

Credentials are like potential energy, the compliments of a name on paper, in documents, word of mouth, but faith is like kinetic energy, the motion and the force that which is witnessed. Hence in the end it is the faith rather than the credentials that really takes you places.

Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.

Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.

Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.

Even the richest of brands are robbed by poor character.

You wander. You work nearly every job known to man, it seems, only to arrive at the wonderings of philosophy.

A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth.

If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.

I think that most artists scorned would prefer to be known as the one with the genius brain risking no career over the one with the good brain and great career.

In a sense, discouragement does not have to exist. Allow it to be rather the encouragement to honestly reconsider all the options, then, as necessary, shine on.

Ingredients to success: know what you do well, know what to do well, and know someone who's swell.

As long as I am breathing, in my eyes, I am just beginning.

Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.

For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.

These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.

Every exceptional bias against Christianity I find to be evidence for its validity.

God will save whomever He chooses to save. The Christian should proselytize not because he thinks he can change everybody; he should proselytize because the Gospel being shared is the ultimate act of love: because he thinks he can love everybody.

Christ didn't join in. He saw which direction the rocks were being thrown, and became a shield.

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.

One of the Christian's biggest fears is appearing 'too Christian'. God forbid, because that's often characterized as god-awful! We want to be one, but without being 'one of them'.

A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.

The biggest challenge after success is shutting up about it.

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

I think that there are excellent and poor thinking habits just as there are healthy and unhealthy eating habits; and when a man really knows how to think, you cannot necessarily assert that he thinks too much in a strictly negative connotation. Perhaps this is in a sense food for thought, whereas the other is fool for thought.

The last thing Scripture should do is make you blind in the world. Instead, you hear everything, see everything, and feel everything because everything just so happens to point right back to it.

In our worldly perceptions of Jesus, we tend to embrace the kindness of his love ('be encouraged') but not the discipline of his love ('and sin no more'). But with the whole scope of his love, or maturity in Christ, we begin relying on him for guidance where we would prefer him to walk beside us rather than behind us.

Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.

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

Create with the heart; build with the mind.

Be willing to give, but only when you aren't expecting anything in return.

Anger's like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart 'til it reaches my outer me

In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.

For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them. Like the apostles in all their loving controversies are those who are masters of words while combining this gift with truth.

A pure heart does not demean the spirit of an individual, it, instead, compels the individual to examine his spirit.

The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception of a righteous heart, then he has given his heart to man.

Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.

Jealousy from a love affair is something even God can admit.

Without Christ a people may always have the freedom to do, but never the power to complete.

Any halfway clever devil would decorate the highway to Hell as beautiful as possible.

What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.

The funny thing about the heart is a soft heart is a strong heart, and a hard heart is a weak heart.

The purest regret, no matter what, is thinking you didn't love enough.

A fruitless year, take a fearless heartOne that blooms late will flourish in the dark

To esteem what makes you holy over what makes you happy - that is the greatest dare.

Trustful people are the pure at heart, as they are moved by the zeal of their own trustworthiness.

There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.

If you're not a smart worker, it's about how hard you work double the amount from the heart; if you're not a hard worker, it's about how smart you work but times two from the brain.

Lingering, bottled-up anger never reveals the 'true colors' of an individual. It, on the contrary, becomes all mixed up, rotten, confused, forms a highly combustible, chemical compound then explodes as something foreign, something very different than one's natural self.

If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it's probably because your heart is talking.

His mindIt says survival of the fittest butHis soulRevival of the idiotsSo good riddance, dancing

On the inside, the copycats of the ruffians are more delicate than the copycats of prudes.

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.

When enemies, the intellect and the heart only see one another as the hater and the fool.

People think that fun in Christ is non-existent, but there is fun wherever your heart lives.

To be more precise about it, it is neither close nor open-mindedness but wisdom, discernment, and a pure heart that God wants.

The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesn't sin but wants to sin.

As a kid my heart would break for the villains.

Part of God's work in his people is synchronizing the heart and the mind thus providing freedom from the deceit of emotion-based beliefs. Emotions are changing while truth is absolute. They don't believe simply because it sounds good, or deep, beautiful, happy, fun, cool, simple, or intelligent to them; but because it's true.

Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.