quotations and passages on forgiveness

forgiveness 2

Love is an act of endless
forgiveness, a tender look
which becomes a habit.

Peter Ustinov

Forgiveness is the perfume the trampled flower
casts back on the foot that crushed it.

Author Unknown

Forgiveness is not
an occasional act;
it is a permanent attitude.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dost thou wish
to receive mercy?
Show mercy
to thy neighbor.

St. John Chrysostom

Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle
by which what is broken is made whole again,
what is soiled is again made clean.

Dag Hammarskjold

Love truth, but pardon error.

Voltaire

To err is human, to forgive, divine.

Alexander Pope

Be assured that if you knew all, you would pardon all.

Thomas a Kempis

Forgiveness enables you to bury your grudge in the icy earth and
put the past behind you. You flush resentment away by being
the first to forgive. Forgiveness fashions your future. It is a brave
and brash thing to do. The gutsiest decision you can make. As you
forgive others, winter will soon make way for springtime as fresh joy
pushes up through the soil of your heart.
Forgiveness is a stunning principal, your ticket out of hate and fear
and chaos. I know what regret feels like; I’ve earned my credentials.
But I also know what forgiveness feels like, because God has
so graciously forgiven me. Forgiveness frees you of the past so
you can make good choices today.

Barbara Johnson

To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love.
In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.

Robert
Muller

The practice of forgiveness can play an important role in your relationships
with others. Forgiveness will enable you to correct distortions in your relationships
and to improve the quality, intensity, and meaningfulness of relationships. It means
letting go of past resentments toward others so that you can experience them
in the present. Even if you do not "feel" like forgiving someone, forgiving them
will release you from the hold of the past and allow you to experience the world
in a new way. To forgive is to step outside the vicious circle of interpretation,
where concepts from the past dominate experience, and to begin to live in terms
of a larger, more worthy purpose. Forgiveness eliminates fear
and anxiety, weakness and vulnerability.

Ari Kiev

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it with fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft, deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

William Blake

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath:
it is twice blest;
It blesseth those that give,
and those that take.

William Shakespeare

Forgiveness is at the heart of a healthy and happy life. Forgiveness protects relationships. It also protects the person who does the forgiving. Remember the story that psychiatrist and author Robert Coles tells
about Ruby, the little girl who integrated a Southern elementary school. Every day the federal marshals had to escort Ruby through a mob
of adults who spat at her and called her hateful names. Remarkably,
the five-year-old girl did not seem to be emotionally damaged by the ordeal, a fact that puzzled Cole until he discovered that Ruby prayed
every day asking God to forgive her persecutors. . . .Forgiveness is a method for giving love. It is a way of saying, "I am going to let go
of the wrong you did; I am not going to be bitter and I am going
to go on loving you anyway."

Bernie Siegel

Emmet
Fox

Let us be merciful in our mental judgments of our brothers and sisters,
for, in truth, we are all one, and the more deeply they seem to err,
the more urgent is the need for us to help them with the right thought,
and so make it easier for them to get free.

God heals through forgiveness and asks that we do likewise. Attack is an easier response than forgiveness, and that is why we are so tempted to give into it. Throughout our lives we have seen more anger than examples of true forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean that we suppress anger; forgiveness means that we have asked for a miracle: the ability to see through mistakes that someone has made
to the truth that lies in all of our hearts. . . .Forgiveness is not always easy.
At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one
that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness. Attack thoughts towards others are attack thoughts towards ourselves. The first step
in forgiveness is the willingness to forgive.

Marianne Williamson

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I believe that the most important thing to consider when thinking about forgiveness is the effect that it has on ourselves. Forgiveness isn't always about the person being forgiven; often, that person will have asked forgiveness and will be very grateful when we do forgive, but probably more often we need to forgive for our own sakes. I've carried around anger and resentment for a while, and I've done so quite often. But the thing that always took it away was the realization--usually later rather than sooner--that my anger wasn't affecting the object of my anger at all, but it was affecting me a great deal, in a very negative way. I wasn't sleeping as I could have been, I wasn't able to focus on the task at hand as well as I could have, I wasn't able to relate to other people effectively.

I have to admit, I still get angry and I don't always forgive as I should, but I try--I don't want that negative baggage to carry around with me. I want my view of the world to be a view filled with wonder and awe, and carrying a grudge taints that view; I'm the one who suffers from my own inability to forgive--just as I'm the only one who can save myself from that suffering by putting things behind me where they belong.

tdw

Today I forgive all those who have ever offended me.
I give my love to all thirsty hearts,
both to those who love me and those who do not love me.

Paramahansa Yogananda

How unhappy are they who cannot forgive themselves.

Publilius Syrus

Pardon one another so that later
on you will not remember the injury.
The recollection of an injury is in itself wrong. It adds
to our anger, nurtures our sin, and hates
what is good. It is a rusty
arrow and poison for the soul.

Francis of Paola

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must
be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete
sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are
saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend
or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by
the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Many promising reconciliations have broken down
because while both parties came prepared to forgive,
neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

Charles William

One forgives to the degree that one loves.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

There's no point in burying a hatchet
if you're going to put up a marker on the site.

Sydney Harris

If you haven't forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?

Dolores Huerta

Forgiveness is the key to action
and freedom.

Hannah Arendt

We don't have choices about who our parents are and how they treated us,
but we have a choice about whether we forgive our parents and heal ourselves.

Bernie Siegel

I think so many of us are too hard on ourselves for what
we didn’t accomplish or what we should have done.
The first step is to forgive yourself for all the things you didn’t do that you should have and all the things that you did do that
you shouldn’t have. Get rid of the guilt. Negative feelings
don’t do you much good. The way to deal with them is
to forgive yourself and forgive others. . . .

Forgiveness helps you come to terms with the past.
I've learned how to forgive myself, and this has helped me
no longer feel deep regrets or sadness about my past.

Morrie Schwartz

Lovingkindness depends on forgiveness. It definitely
works reciprocally. When I am able to forgive
myself--which is not always easy--I am kinder
to everyone. Including myself.

Sylvia Boorstein