Quotes About Forgiveness

Real courage is being kind again, after you've felt that your kindness was thrown in your face. To risk it once more, or even twice more takes a special strength.

Please forgive my appearance. I am lately come from setting a house on fire.

Even though people about us choose the path of hate and violence and warfare and greed and prejudice, we who are Christ's body must throw off these poisons and let love permeate and cleanse every tissue and cell. Nor are we to allow ourselves to become easily discouraged when love is not always obviously successful or pleasant. Love never quits, even when an enemy has hit you on the right cheek and you have turned the other, and he's also hit that.

God is not a celestial prison warden jangling the keys on a bunch of lifers--he's a shepherd seeking for sheep, a woman searching for coins, a father waiting for his son.

Love is not merely a weapon. It is not a strategy, and it may or may not work. To do good to those who hate you is such stupendous folly that it cannot be expected to work. Love didn't work for Jesus.

One day, when Mr. Lincoln was advocating binding up the wounds of the nation, forgiveness, and reconciliation, Thaddeus Stevens pounded the table and said, "Mr. Lincoln, I think enemies ought to be destroyed!" Mr. Lincoln quietly said, "Mr. Stevens, do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?

Qué buscas? preguntó. No sabría decirlo susurré: el perdón la mandala ese perdón que es mío y no puedo otorgarme que camina conmigo y no viene de fuera ese perdón arisco que retumba en mis sienes que me oprime y hace brotar las lágrimas que lavan.

Do not be frightened. Death is instantaneous and passes in a flash. I know, for I have just died with the girl. Forgive my dying. It was unavoidable.

Cerra as janelas do quarto — não ver, não ouvir, não sentir. Na cama silenciosa, flutuante na escuridão, aconchega-se como no ventre perdido e esquece. Tudo é vago, leve e mudo.

Nunca la olvidé: jamás se olvida a una persona con la que se ha dormido.

So she repented. Since she wasn't quite sure for what, she repented entirely and for everything.

Macabéa, Hail Mary, full of grace, serene promised land, land of forgiveness, the time must come, ora pro nobis, and I use myself as a form of knowledge. I know you to the bone through an incantation that comes from me to you. To scatter oneself wildly and yet behind everything pulses an inflexible geometry.

I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves.

Macabéa, Hail Mary, full of grace, serene promised land, land of forgiveness, the time must come, ora pro nobis, and I use myself as a form of knowledge. I know you to the bone through an incantation that comes from me to you. To scatter oneself wildly and yet behind everything pulses an inflexible geometry. Macabéa remembered the docks. The docks went to the heart of her life.

Hope was my greatest sin. — Clarice Lispector, from "The Disasters of Sofia," The Complete Stories (New Directions, 2015)

How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all.

C'était les grandes vacances, en somme. Au programme, cours de natation avec option bateau ivre. Expirez soufflez, expiez crevez.

Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hatred or love.

I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.

Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard

It is never too late to do what is right.

Life moved on like a river, and water could not long remember the bruise it had received from a rock upstream.

What do you want from me? Revenge? Sorry—we're all out of revenge today!