Quotes About Forgiveness

them that if we do not forgive then we run the risk of being eaten up with hatred inside

You can't condemn the present for the wrongs of the past.

You're not angry, Mma?" She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few—and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that—along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains.

Be gentle...Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement on them, but listen. Just listen.

Unless we do something about the past, she thought, then it will weigh us down to such an extent that we simply cannot move. Is that what I want?

we all have some things we are ashamed of.

There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of good people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don't rant and rage.

People punish themselves—sometimes for years. But it's not always necessary. Forgiveness allows everybody to start again, not to be burdened with a whole lot of old business.

If your friend smells of fish you should not try to let it affect your friendship. Everybody, thought Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, knows that.

I think it's best for us to face up to our own mistakes," she

So much had occurred, and so many of the things that had happened were bad. And yet there had been good things—acts of kindness, acts of loyalty and generosity of spirit; why did we forget these and remember only the bad?

We should love one another, she thought, not only because it was the right thing to do, but also because it was far easier than hating one another. People who hated often had to work quite hard at keeping their hatred warm.

Forgiveness was never easy, but Mma Ramotswe believed in it because she knew that without forgiveness we cluttered our lives with old business. Not forgiving was like scratching at a sore to keep the healing scab from forming.

I heard him say that he knew that he had been very stupid and that he would not be stupid again. Those were his very words, Mma, and I wrote them down on a piece of paper which we can keep in the office here and take out and wave at him some time in the future if we need to do so.

For that was a very special sort of love, she realised—love given back to one who loved you; that love was like the first rain, the longed-for rain, which washed away the pain and sadness of the world so that you forgot that those things had ever been there.

The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world.

people are very slow to say sorry. I

there were occasions on which talking about distressing things merely kept those things alive, whereas not talking about them, consigning them to the past, forgetting them, allowed one to think about things that were positive, things that made the world a bit better.

She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger and to hating.

And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating.

Most people try," said Ulf. It was something that he reminded himself of regularly, as it made all the difference in your dealing with people. If you bore in mind that they were trying their best, it became that much easier to be tolerant.

No, on the whole it was better to say kind things of late people, even if they did not fully deserve them. Kindness, after all, did not distinguish between those who merited it and those who did not. It was like rain, she thought. It fell everywhere and made everything green and new and alive once more. That is what it did.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and

Why, she asked herself, why keep a wound open when forgiveness can close it?