Quotes About Forgiveness

You must forgive in order to understand.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace.

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things. No doubt they usually are.

And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn't such a villain after all.

Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.

In eternity people's lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either.

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.

I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preoisterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.

It is the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.

The second you walk off down that road I'll start telling myself you're gone for good, and why wouldn't you be, and I'll start trying to hate you for it. I will hate you for it. I might even leave here entirely.

God's grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts if they really deserve the name, would stand up to cost-benefit analysis.

So began a long instruction in whatever he could trust her to forgive.

So per esperienza che il rimorso è capace di irrompere da una breccia piccolissima e inondare il paesaggio, dimorandovi in pozze e umori con la stessa naturalezza dell'acqua.

Let me say first of all that the grace of God is sufficient to any transgression, and that to judge is wrong, the origin and essence of much error and cruelty.

I felt just the way I imagine the shade of poor old Samuel must have felt when the witch dragged him up from Sheol. Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up? In fact, I had spent the morning darkness praying for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton, and then when he woke me, I was immediately aware that my sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines for the sake of a few more minutes' sleep.

This came to my mind because remembering and forgiving can be contrary things.

There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all.

as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

Forgive. Forget. Life is full of misfortunes.

She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.

When we are children, when we are young, it is natural to love our friends, to be generous to them, to forgive their faults.. But as we grow old and have to earn our bread, friendship does not endure so easily. We must always be on our guard. Our elders no longer look after us, we are no longer content with those simple pleasures of children. Pride grows in us – we wish to become great or powerful or rich, or simply to guard ourself against misfortune.

The fact of the matter is that I wanted to hold a grudge in some funny kind of way.Against everybody.

There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them.They can't be justified.You just do them.Then you forget it.