“Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness.”
Forgiveness is not about letting someone off the hook — it is about putting the hook down. These quotes explore what it takes to release resentment, how to forgive without forgetting, and why holding a grudge mostly punishes the person holding it.
“Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”
“Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness.”
“God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.”
“Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you've closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.”
“Life is an adventure in forgiveness.”
“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
“One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.”
“We cannot embrace God's forgiveness if we are so busy clinging to past wounds and nursing old grudges.”
“Reversing your treatment of the man you have wronged is better than asking his forgiveness.”
“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.”
“Forgotten is forgiven.”
“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.”
“Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.”
“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness is the final form of love.”
“Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.”