Forgiveness Quotes

God's forgiveness allows us to be honest with ourselves. We recognize our imperfections, admit our failures, and plead to God for clemency.
– Jonathan Sacks
God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Forgiveness to the injured does belong but they ne'er pardon who have done wrong.
– John Dryden
Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
– Desmond Tutu
Forgiveness really is so misunderstood, as well as the power it can release in an individual.
– Jennifer O'Neill
Forgiveness is the needle that knows how to mend.
– Jewel Kilcher
Forgiveness isn't about condoning what has happened to you or someone else's actions against you.
– Jennifer O'Neill
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Marianne Williamson
Forgiveness is not to give the other person peace. Forgiveness is for you. Take that opportunity.
– Mackenzie Phillips
Forgiveness is not a feeling - it's a decision we make because we want to do what's right before God. It's a quality decision that won't be easy and it may take time to get through the process, depending on the severity of the offense.
– Joyce Meyer
Forgiveness is indifference. Forgiveness is impossible while love lasts.
– Mary Chesnut
Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
– Corrie Ten Boom
Forgiveness is about empowering yourself, rather than empowering your past.
– T. D. Jakes
Forgive yourself for your faults and your mistakes and move on.
– Les Brown
Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness.
– Billy Graham
China's idea of fair trade is government subsidies of its textile and apparel exports to the United States, currency manipulation, and forgiveness of loans by its government banks.
– Virginia Foxx
Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.
– Desmond Tutu
Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you've closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.
– Desmond Tutu
As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.
– Joan Baez
Any story about revenge is ultimately a story about forgiveness, redemption, or the futility of revenge.
– Nick Wechsler
And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forgiveness.
– Joseph J. Ellis
And as I ask for your forgiveness, I also ask for your support to keep all things in perspective and keep all things in proportion. The good of nine years versus the bad.
– John Rowland
All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.
– The Dalai Lama
Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons.
– Jessica Lange
'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.
– Harlan Coben
Forgiveness is a funny thing, it warms the hearts and cools the sting.
– Peter Allen
This Blood that but one drop of has the power to win. All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
– Saint Thomas Aquinas
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
– Hannah Arendt
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
– W. H. Auden
The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
– William Blake
Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.
– Emile M. Cioran
As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past.
– Gerald R. Ford
You don't have to accept the invitation to get angry. Instead, practice forgiveness, empathy and encouragement.
– Dan Fallon
Forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting... A wounded person cannot - indeed, should not - think that a faded memory can 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.
– Beverly Flanigan
Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.
– Isaac Friedmann
The kernel is the belief that God is love and, in Catholicism, God's love is present in the world. It is in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in our families, in our friends, in our neighborhood, and forgiveness in the touch of a friendly hand, in a rediscovered love God is there.
– Andrew Greeley
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
– Bell Hooks
A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.
– Henrik Ibsen
Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.
– Gerald Jampolsky
When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge.
– Gerald Jampolsky
Forgiveness is God's command.
– Martin Luther
There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.
– Bryant H. McGill
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Her love and tenderness gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
– Eugene O'Neill
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.
– Sara Paddison
True forgiveness is not an action after the fact, it is an attitude with which you enter each moment.
– David Ridge
Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.
– Lily Tomlin
Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting.
– William Arthur Ward
Forgiveness is love in its most noble form.
– Anonymous
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
– Paul Boese
Love therefore—the most beautiful phenomenon in the soul-filled creation, the omnipotent magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and of the most sublime virtue—Love is only the reflection of this single original power, an attraction of the excellent, grounded upon an instantaneous exchange of the personality, a confusion of the beings.
When I hate, so take I something from myself; when I love, so become I so much the richer, by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of an alienated property - hatred of man a prolonged suicide; egoism the highest poverty of a created being.
– Friedrich von Schiller
What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.
What good is it otherwise?
– William Carlos Williams
The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.
– Francis Maitland Balfour
Forgiveness is almost a selfish act because of its immense benefits to the one who forgives.
– Lawana Blackwell
Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.
– Cherie Carter-Scott
Forgiveness does not always lead to a healed relationship. Some people are not capable of love, and it might be wise to let them go along with your anger. Wish them well, and let them go their way.
– Real Live Preacher
Forgiveness is the healing of wounds caused by another. You choose to let go of a past wrong and no longer be hurt by it. Forgiveness is a strong move to make, like turning your shoulders sideways to walk quickly on a crowded sidewalk. It's your move.
– Real Live Preacher
You've just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn't help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honoring what you had together is important. But it's easy to say and harder to do.
– Nicole Kidman
Well, I've never left my faith - but have I made a lot of mistakes? But was I fortunate that I was brought up in that Pentecostal church, where I heard about God's love and God's forgiveness.
– Billy Ray Cyrus
Soon I realized that if beauty equalled forgiveness, I was never going to be forgiven.
– Kevyn Aucoin
I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are.
– Kate Atkinson
I deepen my experience of God through prayer, meditation, and forgiveness.
– Marianne Williamson
Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.
– Joan Lunden
Here is the amazing thing about Easter the Resurrection Sunday for Christians is this, that Christ in the dying moments on the cross gives us the greatest illustration of forgiveness possible.
– T. D. Jakes
Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it.
– Mason Cooley