If you keep holding resentment towards another person, emotionally you are bound to that person for good. And that is bad. To set yourself free from this never-ending predicament, is to forgive and let go.
When you forgive someone, it not because for his or her sake. It is actually for your own sake. You get yourself out from your own anger or guilt. Forgiveness is taking back your power and taking responsibility for how you feel. It is a gift you give yourself than someone else.
To forgive someone does not mean reconciling with the offender. You are not denying or minimizing your hurt. It doesn’t mean you give up your right to be angry when we have been hurt or mistreated. You still retain your ability to be angry but simply use that ability more wisely.
You can learn to forgive and move on. Do not waste your energy trapped in anger and hurt over things you can do nothing about. To forgive is to acknowledges that you can’t change the past. It is not about letting the other person get away with their actions.
If you like to read and explore more about forgiveness, check out this book “Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness” by psychologist Fred Luskin.
Popular Power Of Forgiveness Quotations
Now let’s take a look at my collection of forgiving others quotes to free you from anger and guilt which I have specially selected for you:
“To forgive is human, to forget divine.” – Alexander Pope
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” – Louis B. Smedes
“To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.” – Robert Muller
“Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.” – George MacDonald
“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” – Mark Twain
“Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting.” – William Arthur Ward
“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” – Paul Boese
“Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.” – Isaac Friedmann
“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.” – Hannah Arendt
“Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.” – Indira Gandhi
“Forgiveness is the oil of relationships” – Josh McDowell
“Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it.” – Mason Cooley
“Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting.” – William Arthur Ward
“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” – Paul Boese
“Forgiveness means letting go of the past.” – Gerald Jampolsky
“Forgiveness is the economy of the heart… forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.” – Hannah Moore
“Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself.” – Harriet Nelson
“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” – William Blake
“People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than for being right.” – Joanne Kathleen Rowling
“To forgive is to forgo your resentments and grudges.” – by Quotationize
“Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.” – Oscar Wilde
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.” – George Herbert
“For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” – MATTHEW 6:14
“People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.” – J. K. ROWLING (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)
“To receive an injury is to be wounded; but to forgive and forget it is the cure.” – William Scott Downey
“Forgiveness is healing … especially forgiving yourself.” – Alyson Noel (Evermore:The Immortals)
“Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man.” – Henry Ward Beecher (Life Thoughts)
“He who is devoid of the power to forgive, is devoid of the power to love.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“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
“The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing” – George Bernard Shaw
“Without forgiveness life is governed by… an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.” – Roberto Assagioli
“Most of us can forgive and forget; we just don’t want the other person to forget that we forgave” – Ivern Ball
“Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr
“Without forgiveness, there’s no future” – Desmond Tutu
“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
“Life is an adventure in forgiveness.” – Norman Cousins
“Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.” – Alice Duer Miller
“As long as you don’t forgive, who and whatever it is will occupy a rent-free space in your mind.” – Isabelle Holland
“Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.” – Cherie Carter-Scott
“Only the brave know how to forgive. … A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.” – Laurence Sterne
“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” – Robert Quillen
“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.” – Thomas S. Szasz
“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
“Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.” – Marlene Dietrich
“Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.” – Oscar Wilde
“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.” – Bryant H. McGill
“True forgiveness is not an action after the fact, it is an attitude with which you enter each moment.” – David Ridge
Related Topic:
Here is an essay entitled “To Understand Is To Forgive” written by John Daniel Barry.
IT COMES from the French, this greatest of all proverbs, Tout comprendre est tout pardonner. The French idiom very tersely expresses the thought.Literally translated, “To understand all is to forgive all,” it does not sound natural. But we have an equivalent even more terse than the original French and just as expressive, “To understand is to forgive.”
A WOMAN of my acquaintance lived for many years with a man of irascible temper. His explosions used to be terrifying. At such times he would speak to his wife in ways that would be almost unendurable. But the wife endured. She persisted in enduring even after her relatives tried to force her to leave the man.
Finally he became violently and hopelessly insane. Then the physicians discovered that he had been insane for years.
The wife was both glad and sorry, glad because she had not added to his sufferings and failed in what she believed to be her duty by abandoning him, sorry because she had not been able to help.
If he had been properly treated, perhaps put away for a time, he might have been cured. She, too, might have been spared a great deal of anguish. Now, however, she understood. And understanding, it was easy for her to forgive.
YEARS ago I used to know a popular writer of humorous stories. Like many humorists he was subject to profound depression. It made him develop a pessimistic philosophy. He used to make grave charges against nature. “We are put into this world without any volition on our part,” he would say, “and for a few years we are allowed to be young arid to enjoy the pleasures of youth. Then we begin to grow old and we are forced to stay here and see ourselves decay.”
Some of his friends used to argue that, if we cared enough, we could turn the passing years to profit and make our lives richer.
But he had no patience with any such theory. For months at a time he would be unable to work. Occasionally when I would go to see him I would find him sitting motionless, helpless, giving himself up to what he called “the blue devils.”
Once I asked him if he didn’t take any interest in his work. He made a wry face. “I grind it out word by word,” he said, “and every word draws blood!”
But his writing read as if he had dashed it off gaily, spontaneously.
On another occasion I asked him if he didn’t get any happiness out of his success. He shrugged his shoulders. “I like the money,” he said.
People who loved his stories used to try to meet him. But he kept out of the way. To ask him to meet an admirer was to impose a burden on him.
His case puzzled me. I often wondered how one who was offered so much could have so poor a capacity for enjoying.
He died long before he had time to be overtaken by the decay that he feared.
It was a relief to me to hear that when the doctors performed an autopsy on his body they found several of his vital organs diseased. Now I could understand. It was not life that was wrong. It was he himself.
He simply had not known how to take care of his physical machine. So his mind, without proper support, suffered and rebelled and inflicted on him the torment of depressing thoughts.
So often we think that life is wrong when the wrong lies in ourselves.
IN THE physical life we all know that to understand is to forgive.
It is easy for us to see with our eyes, to understand by means of our senses. So it is easy for us to forgive. Indeed, in cases of obvious physical defects, we go so far as never to speak or to think of forgiving. We find nothing to forgive. We feel with the sufferers. We pity. And where we can we try to help.
When we see people writhing in physical agony or groaning or screaming we don t blame them for disturbing our peace of mind.
If we are selfish, however, we may long to escape from the sight and sound of such suffering.
Most of us have to understand through our senses or we can t understand at all.
It is when we have to understand through the reason and through the imagination that the test comes.
Here we all make lamentable failures.
In most cases the explanation is that we don t try to understand.
Now we know that mysterious forces are at work in life, making people do things that are beyond our comprehension.
The knowledge alone ought to make us slow to judge and to condemn.
Some day, perhaps, we shall grasp the meaning of those forces. Perhaps we shall be able to control them. Then we shall realize the folly of punishing.
THERE is a man of my acquaintance who, during a long career, has occupied a position of great public trust. He has been a prosecutor of evil doers. Mercilessly he has exposed them. Whenever he could, he would drive them to the penitentiary. And while he has been doing this work he has been learning things about life. He has been developing. He has now reached the place where he is able to take a wholly new view of his duty and of his relation to society.
As Lincoln Steffens says, he has caught up with himself. He has found that he, too, is an evil doer. And much of the evil he believes has resulted from his exposing and punishing those other evil doers. He longs to make reparation.
For in his work of the past he has detected self-righteousness and the lack of sympathy that self-righteousness always engenders.
In the lack of sympathy he knows there is lack of understanding. He realizes that to understand is not only to forgive, but to sympathize, to feel with others, to put oneself in the other s place.
WHEN, with real understanding, we put ourselves in the place of another, no matter how dreadful that place may be, we are not slow to forgive, we are eager. We judge others then as we almost invariably judge ourselves.
It is only by a great effort of the imagination that we can escape from ourselves and take the point of another who does things or thinks or says things we are opposed to.
And yet all we have to do is to realize that, in indulging self-justification, others are doing exactly as we do.
Few of us seem capable of doing what the man I have referred to is doing, getting away from ourselves and viewing our actions impersonally.
But what he has done we must all do if we are to know the meaning of life and to live by it.
THERE are so many avenues leading to this every-day truth that we show considerable adroitness in losing the way. Our persistence suggests that we don’t really care.
For example, the doctors and the scientists are continually warning us about heredity and the influences of environment and the relation between physical health and mental health.
We know that there are people who inherit a tendency to drink. And yet, as members of society, we place temptations in their way. Most of us may be immune for the simple reason that we have not inherited this particular weakness.
Yet when we see the drunkard we help to make, we shrink away or turn aside our faces, and we shake our heads.
We seldom think of helping.
Nearly always we judge. Perhaps the proverb ought to be changed. Perhaps it should be: “To understand is to forgive every one but ourselves.”
IN THE slums of the great cities vice is rampant. When we go slumming we see it expressed through women that we call fallen women and through men that have reached the same depths or greater depths.
We used to blame the women and men far more than we do now.
About these people we are learning.
Among other things we are learning that, with very few exceptions, they are not in the depths because they choose to be there, but because we have helped to drive them there, you and I among the others.
And even toward those we call “naturally depraved” we are changing our attitude.
If they are “naturally depraved,” of course they are not to blame. They deserve only pity and help.
Shall we further afflict those already so afflicted?
JUST NOW there are others, very different in appearance and just as blind to truth, in some ways just as depraved.
They live in magnificent houses, they wear beautiful clothes and they go about in automobiles.
It is they who have captured a large part of the bounty of the earth.
They are keeping for themselves far more than they can use, or their children can use, or their children’s children.
Their greed is making millions of their fellow creatures suffer.
But they pay no heed. They don t understand.
Some of us are angry about them. But our anger is unjustifiable.
For if we were in their place, if we led lives like theirs, so sheltered from the truth, we should be just like them.
IF WE feel patience and pity for the wretches of the slums, let us feel pity and patience for those others.
They are losing the opportunities of life exactly as those others are.
They are not to blame. They haven t waked up yet. They don t understand.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
“Smiling” is reprinted from Intimations:Dealing Mainly With Aspects of Everyday Living by John D. Barry. Published: San Francisco, P. Elder and company [c1913]