“Hollywood and the media has been intent in recent times on saturating our minds and mouths with the f-word. Jesus Christ has been intent on saturating our hearts with His f-word for 2,000 years — forgiveness.” ——Gary Amirault
“Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.” ——George MacDonald
“Keep a fair-sized cemetery in your back yard, in which to bury the faults of your friends.” ——Henry Ward Beecher
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” ——Mahatma Gandhi
“Know all and you will pardon all.” ——Thomas à Kempis
“We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies.” ——Voltaire
“A mature Christian has capacity to absorb the offenses and weaknesses of others, not just demand they perform up to the code of ideals.” ——Stephen Crosby
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.” ——Author Unknown
“Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.” ——Cherie Carter-Scott
“The offender never pardons.” ——George Herbert
“He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.” ——George Herbert
“Resentment is like a glass of poison that a man drinks; then he sits down and waits for his enemy to die.” ——Nelson Mandela
“Many people are afraid to forgive because they feel they must remember the wrong or they will not learn from it. The opposite is true. Through forgiveness, the wrong is released from its emotional stranglehold on us so that we can learn from it. Through the power and intelligence of the heart, the release of forgiveness brings expanded intelligence to work with the situation more effectively.” ——David McArthur & Bruce McArthur
“A Christian will find it cheaper to pardon than to resent. Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, and the waste of spirit.” ——Hannah More
“Forgiveness means that you’ve decided not to let it keep festering inside even if it only comes up once in awhile.” ——Doc Childre and Howard Martin
“Sincere forgiveness isn’t colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don’t worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time — just like it does for you and me.” ——Sara Paddison
“Forgiveness is giving up the possibility of a better past.” ——Author Unknown
“I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note — torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.” ——Henry Ward Beecher
“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.” ——Sholem Asch
“Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting.” ——William A. Ward
“You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.” ——Lewis B. Smedes
“What we forgive too freely doesn’t stay forgiven.” ——Mignon McLaughlin
“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” ——William Blake
“We frequently forgive those who bore us, but cannot forgive those whom we bore.” ——François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
“It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.” ——Jessamyn West
“Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.” ——Lord Chesterfield
“Don’t tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.” ——Logan Pearsall Smith
“Forgiveness is accepting God’s sovereign use of people and situations to strip you of self importance, and humiliate your self love.” ——Martha Kilpatrick
“Without deep humility, true forgiveness is impossible… and will never happen.” ——Martha Kilpatrick
“Forgiveness is me giving up my right to hurt you for hurting me.” ——Author Unknown
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” ——Mark Twain
“Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury.” ——E.H. Chapin
“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” ——Abraham Lincoln
“There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.” ——Josh Billings
“Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much.” ——Oscar Wilde
“To err is human; to forgive, divine.” ——Alexander Pope
“Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness, or else forgiving another.” ——Jean Paul Richter
“The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.” ——William Blake
“Yes, this is what good is: to forgive evil. There is no other good.” ——Antonio Porchia
“Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.” ——Dag Hammarskjold
“Forgiveness is choosing to love. It is the first skill of self-giving love.” ——Mahatma Gandhi
“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck… But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.” ——Ellen Goodman
“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” ——Robert Quillen
“Forgiveness is the final form of love.” ——Reinhold Niebuhr
“One forgives to the degree that one loves.” ——François de La Rochefoucauld
“‘Tis the most tender part of love, each other to forgive.” ——John Sheffield
“Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.” ——H. Jackson Brown
“We are all on a life long journey and the core of its meaning, the terrible demand of its centrality is forgiving and being forgiven.” ——Martha Kilpatrick
“Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another’s control… to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else’s nightmare.” ——Lance Morrow
“Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.” ——Louis B. Smedes
“It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.” ——Louis B. Smedes
“When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.” ——Louis B. Smedes
“Whoever is forgiven much, loves much.” ——Luke 7:47, The Bible
“It is one thing to be forgiven, to actually receive it is another matter.” ——Gary Amirault
“The woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears received a stream of loving forgiveness as her sins were forgiven. And the religiously proud were indignant. The Pharisees, religious, self-righteous, proud in Jesus’ day as well as ours would receive rivers of living water if they saw the depth of their depravity and need. But pride makes us blind.” ——Gary Amirault
“The true Christian is like sandalwood, which imparts its fragrance to the axe which cuts it, without doing any harm in return.” ——Sadhu Sundar Singh
“Poor souls are apt to think that all those whom they read or hear of to be gone to heaven, went there because they were so good and holy… Yet not one of them, not any one that is now in heaven (Jesus Christ alone excepted), did ever come there any other way but by forgiveness of sins.” ——John Owen
“Do you think that every time you make a mistake, He is mad at you and won’t talk to you… or that you must somehow make up for it?… Many Christians fail to experience real peace because they don’t understand that they are righteous in Christ. Until people stop living according to the way they feel and stand on who they are in Christ, they will never find true happiness.” ——Joyce Meyer
“None of us wants to admit that we hate someone… When we deny our hate we detour around the crisis of forgiveness. We suppress our spite, make adjustments, and make believe we are too good to be hateful. But the truth is that we do not dare to risk admitting the hate we feel because we do not dare to risk forgiving the person we hate.” ——Lewis B. Smedes
“It takes a lot of emotional and psychological energy to keep a wound open, to keep a grudge alive. The longer I allow a wound to fester, the more bitterness, anger and self-pity poison my blood and eat at my heart.” ——Albert Haase
“The Risen Christ proclaimed not that we ‘have to forgive,’ but rather, that at last we CAN forgive — and thereby free ourselves from consuming bitterness and the offender from our binding condemnation. This process requires genuine human anger and grief, plus — and here is the awful cost of such freedom — a humble willingness to see the offender as God sees that person, in all his or her terrible brokenness and need for God’s saving power. I would never tell another, ‘You have to forgive.’ But my uncomfortable duty as a Christian is to confess the truth, so lethal to our self-centred human nature: ‘Jesus, who suffered your sin unto his own death, calls you likewise to forgive, so that God’s purposes may be accomplished in both you and your offender.'” ——Gordon Dalbey
“If slighted, slight the slight, and love the slighter.” ——Author Unknown
“He that carries bitterness to bed with him will find the devil creeping between the sheets.” ——William Secher
“The most miserable prison in the world is the prison we make for ourselves when we refuse to show mercy. Our thoughts become shackled, our emotions are chained, the will is almost paralyzed. But when we show mercy, all of these bonds are broken, and we enter into a joyful liberty that frees us to share God’s love with others.” ——Warren W. Wiersbe
“What if thou hadst committed the sins of a thousand? What if thou hadst committed the sins of a million worlds? Christ’s righteousness will cover, Christ’s blood will cleanse thee from the guilt of all.” ——George Whitefield
“When you give up vengeance, make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine… Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secure when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction. Vengeance is personal satisfaction. Justice is moral accounting… Human forgiveness does not do away with human justice.” ——Lewis B. Smedes
“If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent an educator. If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist. But since our greatest need was forgiveness, God sent us a Saviour.” ——Roy Lessin
“The Christian communities in which we live play a vital role in the business of forgiveness. No matter what the Bible says, and no matter what the bishop pronounces, it is the community that forgives the sinner and receives him or her back into fellowship or ‘retains the sin’ and closes the door on the sinner. The gospel story of the raising of Lazarus has some application here (John 11:1-44). Jesus brought Lazarus back to life, but it was the community that was given the job of unbinding him. You may want to reflect on the life of the community in which you live. Is it a forgiving, reconciling community which will receive back the individual who has missed the mark? How could your community be more forgiving? More loving? More an instrument of reconciliation?” ——Bob Libby
“I had the choice to either grow up and find God in the situation or become bitter. I chose to find God. And I experienced freedom like I never knew before.” ——Heather Mercer
“Scarcely any law of our Redeemer is more openly transgressed, or more industriously evaded, than that by which he commands his followers to forgive injuries.” ——Samuel Johnson
“Unforgiveness is like a scratch on an old record. The song never goes on to the end, it keeps the beautiful music yet to be released unheard and all that resounds are the same old three or four chords again and again and again.” ——Katherine Walden
“Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches. It is that we remember not to consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.” ——John Calvin
“Love is an act of endless forgiveness.” ——Jean Vanier
“Forgiveness — so easy to believe in its value — so hard to practice.” ——Gary Amirault
“Right now, this very second, this very moment that you spend reading these words is ‘new’. How you choose to be a steward of that ‘new slate’ is up to you. My fervent prayer is that I never take for granted that gift of ‘newness’ and that I do all in his power granted to me to cherish the potential of ‘all things new’. Relationships strained, mistakes made, I’ll bring them to the cross so I can treasure the gift of newness he grants me every day. ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.’ 1 John 1:9 NIV” ——Katherine Walden
“To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life — to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son — how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it means to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.” ——C.S. Lewis
“Recognize that peace and forgiveness do not depend on feelings of piety but on Christ and on what He has done.” ——John White
“‘They owe, they owe, they owe!’ Such is the voice of unforgiveness. And all the while the accuser is in his own debtors’ prison having forgotten to give forgiveness. Unforgiveness is a debt that makes life a prison cell.” ——Gary Amirault
“We cannot be right with God when we are wrong with others.” ——Lehman Strauss
“Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And He invites us all to forgive each other.” ——Lewis B. Smedes
“We implore the mercy of God, not that He may leave us at peace in our vices, but that He may deliver us from them.” ——Blaise Pascal
“God forgave us without any merit on our part; therefore we must forgive others, whether or not we think they merit it.” ——Lehman Strauss
“Jesus embodies the rule of God in which no one is beyond God’s forgiveness no matter who they are or what they have done. The answer to my parishioner’s burning question about divine forgiveness was, of course: No, you cannot be too bad to be forgiven. You can only be too good. For example: too self-righteous to be humble, compassionate, or receptive to God’s spirit.” ——Lewis B. Smedes
“A rattlesnake, if cornered, will sometimes become so angry it will bite itself. That is exactly what the harboring of hate and resentment against others is — a biting of oneself. We think that we are harming others in holding these spites and hates, but the deeper harm is to ourselves.” ——Eli E. Stanley
“If a man wants God to hear his prayer quickly, then before he prays for anything else, even his own soul, when he stands and stretches out his hands toward God, he must pray with all his heart for his enemies. Through this action God will hear everything that he asks.” ——Abba Zeno
“Forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right, it makes you free.” ——Stormie Omartian
“I firmly believe a great many prayers are not answered because we are not willing to forgive someone.” ——Dwight L. Moody
“Everything you do in revenge against a brother who has harmed you will come back to your mind at the time of prayer.” ——Abba Nilus
“Forgiveness is the only way to break the cycle of blame — and pain — in a relationship… It does not settle all questions of blame and justice and fairness… But it does allow relationships to start over. In that way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. It is not our capacity to think that makes us different, but our capacity to repent, and to forgive.” ——Philip Yancey
“If we see a speck in a brother’s eye, we must first see if there is a log in our own eye; perhaps that speck in our brother’s eye is only a reflection of the beam in our own.” ——David Watson
“An elder was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner. And he said to him: ‘Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away?’ The soldier replied: ‘No. I will mend it and put it back on.’ The elder said to him: ‘If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image?'” ——Author Unknown
“A man who is wrathful with us is a sick man; we must apply a plaster to his heart — love; we must treat him kindly, speak to him gently, lovingly. And if there is not deeply-rooted malice against us within him, but only a temporary fit of anger, you will see how his heart, or his malice, will melt away through your kindness and love — how good will conquer evil. A Christian must always be kind, gracious, and wise in order to conquer evil by good.” ——John of Kronstadt
“Christianity, with its tens of thousands of different denominations and scores of Bible translations that differ from one another can be quite confusing. But when you truly come to bedrock, and experience peace with your Maker through Jesus Christ’s perfect life, everything becomes much clearer and more beautiful.” ——Gary Amirault