Quotes About Forgiveness

I always thought I hated the bastard, but knowing that I'm never going to get the chance to tell him how much I hated him breaks my heart.

My love and my joy, if I die from illness, madness or sadness, if before the time allotted me by fate is up, I can't get enough of looking at you, enough joy in the dilapidated mills on the emerald wormwood hills, if I don't drink my fill of the transparent water from your immortal hands, if I don't make it to the end, if I don't tell everything that I wanted to tell about you, about myself, if one day I die without saying farewell—forgive me.

Do not use poisonous words against anyone, for words wound more fatally than even arrows.

The moment you resent a person, you become his slave. Living with resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to get sick. The person who is the focus of your animosity may be feeling just fine, enjoying life, and not troubled while you are letting them rent space in your brain. Resentment gives you illusions of strength.

What a lovely place this world would be if only people would feel affection for everyone else, and all the ugliness of the human heart were to vanish - our envy of those better off than ourselves and our scorn for those worse off.

No matter how deep in disgrace, a human being IS human, after all.

Too many people think repenting means feeling terrible about something someone has done. Feeling bad is fine, and it often accompanies repentance, but repentance is not so much about what we feel but the twofold prong of owning up to our own injustices and failures to love, and starting all over by living justly and lovingly.

Community is like peace in that it is a result instead of an action. Peace results from acts of justice and behaviors of love. Community also emerges out of loving behaviors—like compassion and an embrace and forgiveness — and out of acts of justice.

Jesus is teaching a kingdom perspective on how to deal with those who have sinned against us. Since the kingdom is a world of reconciliation, kingdom people are to forgive.

He's staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don't know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1–5; cf. Jas 4:11–12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don't are not kingdom people.

Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading us to repentance)." And: "As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both 'I did it, my sins sent him there' and 'he did it, his love took him there.

when we peer into our own hearts, we will have sufficient cause — even laughably ridiculous cause — to see our own sin and be humbled before God. That will lead us to an other-awareness that our fellow disciples and humans are like us, sinners in need of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and patience. This reversal of the proclivity to be gods creates on our part a tenderness in our perception of the sins of others.

Forgiveness is difficult at the personal and pastoral level, and the twofold reason is because Jesus was so forceful about its necessity for his followers and we find forgiveness so demanding and difficult.

Instead of striking back, which would be both justifiable and equal retribution and a part of Moses' "no mercy" law, Jesus creates an almost laughable scene of grace: "turn to them the other cheek also." This is how Jesus did respond (Matt 26:67).

But their peace will never be greater than when they encounter evil people in peace and are willing to suffer from them."48

No, his repentance parts the water so that our (weak) repentance can stand up in that water.

To love enemies breaks through the self barrier into divine space.

Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.

when you can laugh at your mistake, you know you've accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past.

The heart's metanoia, on the other hand, turns without regret, turns not so much away, as toward, as if the slow pilgrim has been surprised to find that sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.

Sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.

We are not on this planet to ask forgiveness of our deities

When I talked with God about the stuff I faced, first on the list was the face I stuffed.

Salvation history reveals sin as literally a broken home.