Forgiveness Quotes

“We don't forgive people because they deserve it. We forgive them because they need it—because we need it.”
― Bree Despain, The Dark Divine

“For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
― Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve

“Forgiveness isn’t my best thing.
Easier staying pissed. But I’m
tired of being pissed all the time.
Tired of feeling hurt by stuff that
can never be fixed because it is
an indelible part of the past.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Fallout

“One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.”
― Socrates

“What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

“Forgiveness is God's greatest gift”
― Dan Brown, The da Vinci Code

“They lie, you know. It's not easier to ask for forgiveness. Not even a little.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer

“All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.”
― Asa Don Brown

“It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“Fuck You Poem #45

Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.

Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.

Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,
bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.

And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you.”
― Amy Gerstler, Ghost Girl

“You want to know what price I asked for forgiving Arobynn, Celaena?" Sam stood so still the he might have been a statue. "My price was his oath that he'd never lay a hand on you again. I told him I'd forgive him in exchange for that.”
― Sarah J. Maas, The Assassin's Blade

“Anger is an essential part of being human. People are taught to deny themselves anger, and in this, they are actually opening themselves up to hate. The more you deny yourself the freedom to be angry, the more you will hate. Let yourself be angry, and hate will disintegrate, and when hate disintegrates, forgiveness prevails! The more you deny that you are angry, in attempts to be "holy" the more inhuman you will become, and the more inhuman you will become, the harder it will be to forgive.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.”
― Deb Caletti

“It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“We are none of us perfect, and no one expects perfection. But when you have hurt people, you must allow them their anger. Otherwise it will only become another thing you have tried to take away.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Iron

“Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?

Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.

We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”
― Hannah Arendt

“With friends, if you keep making an effort to reach out and you keep getting hurt, you eventually stop trying. But it's much harder to give up on family. Somewhere deep down you want it to work so badly that you keep making the same mistake over and over again.”
― Tori Spelling

“Love people who hate you. Pray for people who have wronged you. It won’t just change their life…it’ll change yours.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
― Abraham Lincoln, Great Speeches / Abraham Lincoln: with Historical Notes by John Grafton

“See, forgiveness doesn't happen all at once. It's not an event -- it's a process. Forgiveness happens while you're asleep, while you're dreaming, while you're inline at the coffee shop, while you're showering, eating, farting, jerking off. It happens in the back of your mind, and then one day you realize that you don't hate the person anymore, that your anger has gone away somewhere. And you understand. You've forgiven them. You don't know how or why. It sneaked up on you. It happened in the small spaces between thoughts and in the seconds between ideas and blinks. That's where forgiveness happens. Because anger and hatred, when left unfed, bleed away like air from a punctured tire, over time and days and years. Forgiveness is stealth. At least, that's what I hope.”
― Barry Lyga, Boy Toy

“It is in the healing of self-blame and judgement, that the self is liberated from the constraints of binding emotions...And you come to remember your true authentic self." © 2015 W.E. Slater”
― Wendy E. Slater, Into the Hearth, Poems-Volume 14

“If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much talked of immortality.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.”
― Albert Camus

“So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?"
And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say.
"Always," I say to him. "Every time.”
― Patrick Ness, The Ask and the Answer