Forgiving Quotes

Forgiveness is . . . accepting God's sovereign use of people and situations to strip you of self importance, and humiliate your self love.

Sincere forgiveness isn't colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don't worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time—just like it does for you and me.

Resentment is like a glass of poison that a man drinks; then he sits down and waits for his enemy to die.

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies.

When you forgive, you in no way change the past - but you sure do change the future.

To understand is to forgive, even oneself.

To be social is to be forgiving.

There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.

Forgiviness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.

Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind and each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again...Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory. Forgiving sets you free.

An unforgivable injury is a profound and irreversible assault on the fundamental belief system of the person who has been injured...--beliefs about themselves, the world, other people, good and bad, right and wrong, the future, and even the validity of the history they have shared with the person who hurt them...The forgiving process is one in which both morality and meaning are defined and redefined until the world again makes sense.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting...A faded memory [cannot] provide an expiation of the past. To forgive, one must remember the past, put it into perspective, and move beyond it. Without remembrance, no wound can be transcended.

People who have been wronged badly and wounded deeply should give themselves time and space before they forgive...There is a right moment to forgive. We cannot predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives...Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long...If we wait too long to forgive, our rage settles in and claims squatter's rights to our souls.

Not even God can make something fair out of what is intrinsically unfair. Only one thing can be done. Something must break through the crust of unfairness and create a chance for a new fairness. Only forgiveness can make the breakthrough.