Quotes from Desmond Tutu

Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart.

A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

Many people ask me what I have learned from all of the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful. It is true. People really are wonderful.

If you do not for give you actually are tying yourself to the perpetrator, that you are going to live your life as a victim. And you won't experience a liberation that comes from forgiving.

As a Christian, I believe in the sanctity of life and that death is a part of life.

People almost always imagine that life is going to be better in town and that the streets of the town are paved with gold.

Does taking the life of the perpetrator return your mom? No.

I hope that when the time comes, I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life's journey in the manner of my choice.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

It is for real that injustice and oppression will not have the last word. There was a time when Hitler looked like he was going to vanquish all of Europe, and where is he now?

Instead of growing old gracefully, at home with my family - reading and writing and praying and thinking - too much of my time has been spent at airports and in hotels.

There is only one way to eat an elephant, a bite at a time.

A time of crisis is not just a time of anxiety and worry. It gives a chance, an opportunity, to choose well or to choose badly.

The destruction of the earth's environment is the human rights challenge of our time.

Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.

I have a lot of time for young people.

Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

If we have loved well while we were alive, there is life after death here-our love will go on for generations.

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity - or because of their sexual orientation.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

We can be human only together. A person is a person to other persons. We so desperately long for all of us to learn that we are meant for one another. We are meant for complementarity.