I've Learned To Forgive Quotes & Sayings

In pursuit of exposing people for who we think they are, we expose ourself. — Shannon L. Alder

I also learned afresh that friendship requires a constant willingness to forgive each other for not being Christ, and a willingness to ask Christ himself to be the true center of the relationship. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

When I learned to forgive, it was like a million pounds were lifted from me. — Reba McEntire

Perhaps we still have a basically superstitious tendency to associate failure with dishonesty and guilt - failure being interpreted as "punishment." Even if a man starts out with good intentions, if he fails we tend to think he was somehow "at fault." If he was not guilty, he was at least "wrong." And "being wrong" is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility and identification. Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy. — Thomas Merton

Forgive me,
joy,
if I blasphemed you
before I learned to love. — Milan Rufus

When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior. — Mignon McLaughlin

To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? — J.M. Coetzee

Give me your hands," I said.
I studied his palms. "Yes, she'll forgive you. She'll realize you saved her."
"You're a palm reader now?"
"Yes."
"When did you learn how to do that?"
"While you were sleeping."
"I waste so much time sleeping. What else do you see?"
"I see food. Max is going to bring food."
"Do you see cake?"
"No, no cake."
"Let me see your hands," he said.
I raised an eyebrow.
"I learned while you were talking." He studied my palms. "Your scars cross over the lines in your hands, like you have two lives... One to mess up and one to get right."
"That's convenient. What else do you see?"
"I see you happy," he said.
"Yeah?" I asked.
He nodded. "And I see you."
My fingers itched to reach out and touch his face, to make sure I'd still know him in the dark.
"I see you, too," I said. — Shalanda Stanley

I have learned to accept my responsibility and to forgive myself first, then to apologise to anyone injured by my misreckoning. — Maya Angelou

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person. — Amy Tan

The family is the hospital closest to us: when someone is sick, they are cared for there, where possible. The family is the first school for children, it is the unwavering reference point for the young, it is the best home for the elderly. It is the first school of mercy, because it is there that we have been loved and learned to love, have been forgiven and learned to forgive. — Pope Francis

Forgive but punish bad behavior, reward the good ones and celebrate the victories and lessons learned. — Ben Tolosa

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart. — Sue Monk Kidd

and though he admitted it to no one, especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often filled his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He sought traces of his parents' faces and voices among the people who surrounded and cared for him, but there was absolutely nothing, no one, at Langford to remind him of them. After that first semester he had slipped as best as he could into this world, swimming competitively, calling boys by their last names, always wearing khakis because jeans were not allowed. He learned to live without his mother and father, as everyone else did, shedding his daily dependence on them even though he was still a boy, and even to enjoy it. Still, he refused to forgive them. — Anonymous

In Psalm 32:1 David reminded us that the blessed person is the one "whose transgressions are forgiven, / whose sins are covered." How sad that he learned the lesson through such bitter experience. The word covered in the Hebrew is kasah, and it means "to cover, conceal, hide; to clothe; ... to forgive; to keep secret; to hide oneself, wrap oneself up."14 When we try desperately to cover up our sinful ways, we are bound for disaster as sin perpetuates. Only through repentance will God "cover" us and "clothe" us with His loving forgiveness. Only when we run to Him in the nakedness of our sin will He wrap us up with "garments of salvation" and a "robe of righteousness" (Isa. 61:10). — Beth Moore

I reached a healthy place in which I was able to stop projecting my needs on another human being. We both came to understand that each of us is limited in our capacity to be for another what is needed, and learned to forgive each other for not being God. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Forgiveness is no easy task; it takes a lifetime of remembering to move on — LDarnell

What I've learned over the years is that people shouldn't be defined by a single mistake. Everyone messes up," she said. "You have to forgive yourself and move one. — Gena Showalter

Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it. — Maya Angelou

But if I've learned one thing, it's this: forgiveness is crucial. If you can't forgive someone you're mad at, that anger will poison you. You have to learn to let it go" ... "people have reasons for doing the things that they do, especially when they care about you. You may not always understand what they are, but if you can try to understand the person then you might see that they really care, despite what happened."
pg 100 Meredith to Vlad — Heather Brewer

I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy. — Tyler Perry

I'm not tormenting myself. I learned long ago that in order to heal my wounds, I must have the courage to face up to them. I also learned to forgive myself and correct my mistakes. However, ever since I started out on this journey, I've had a sense of being confronted by a vast jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which are only just beginning to revealed, pieces of love, hate, sacrifice, forgiveness, joy, and grief. — Paulo Coelho

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys. They do not need to walk off every cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can harbor the sense that there is more to life that they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More? — Barbara Brown Taylor

I have learned, that the person I have to ask for forgiveness from the most is: myself. You must love yourself. You have to forgive yourself, everyday, whenever you remember a shortcoming, a flaw, you have to tell yourself "That's just fine". You have to forgive yourself so much, until you don't even see those things anymore. Because that's what love is like. — C. JoyBell C.

I have learned through repeated experiences that in order to heal, I MUST forgive. The forgiveness is not for the transgressor. The forgiveness is for ME. — Sharon E. Rainey

I learned some invaluable lessons in Nashville that apply to both farming and show business: Do not corner something you know is meaner than you; keep skunks of all kinds at a distance; if you forgive your enemies, it messes up their heads. — Willie Nelson

If it helps you. I forgive you. But i have learned in recent weekd that seeking forgiveness from others is meaningless unless you can forgive yourself. — Maya Banks

Without knowing it, I had identified a subtle but important part of the healing process. There would be no peace for me, no life for me, until I learned to forgive life for what it had done to me, forgive others for still being alive, and eventually, forgive myself for being alive. — Neil Peart

I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it. — Ann Patchett

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? — Harold S. Kushner

Once there lived in the ancient city of Afkar two learned men who hated and belittled each other's learning. For one of them denied the existence of the gods and the other was a believer.
One day the two met in the market-place, and amidst their followers they began to dispute and to argue about the existence or the non-existence of the gods. And after hours of contention they parted.
That evening the unbeliever went to the temple and prostrated himself before the altar and prayed the gods to forgive his wayward past.
And the same hour the other learned man, he who had upheld the gods, burned his sacred books. For he had become an unbeliever. — Kahlil Gibran

I ran with him and suddenly I was released from fear as the mad, God-given joy of battle came to me for the very first time. Later, much later, I learned that the joy and the fear are the exact same things, the one merely transformed into the other by action, but on that summer afternoon I was suddenly elated. May God and His angels forgive me, but that day I discovered the joy that lies in battle and for a long time afterwards I craved it like a thirsty man seeking water. — Bernard Cornwell