Elizabeth Smart Quotes

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

I will always forgive but I will never forget.

I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I think it's very important that not all of that anger was turned to revenge.

Hate is self-destructive. If you hate somebody, you're not hurting the person you hate. You're hurting yourself. And that's a healing. Actually, it's a real healing, forgiveness.

If I didn't forgive the people who took me into the barracks and beat me unconscious over a period of days during the period when the British state was indicted for inhuman and degrading treatment in 1971-72, or even the guys who shot me, if you don't forgive them, you end up with unnecessary baggage.

Forgiveness isn't about condoning what has happened to you or someone else's actions against you.

What is forgiven is usually well remembered.

I once had a lot of hatred, mainly toward my father, an alcoholic.

He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.

It'd be really nice to sit down with all the people who have hurt me and tell them all the reasons that they've affected me.

I have forgiven those who were persecuting me.

When we have painful memories from hurting experiences, we may feel justified in holding on to the resentment. But resentment is corrosive. It doesn't affect the person we feel anger toward, it destroys the host.

It's not easy to forgive. I definitely don't forget, but I do forgive and I think that you should.

The longer we hate, the harder it is to heal us.

If you're holding on to an offense, then you haven't forgiven the person who hurt you. Unforgiveness finds excuses to talk about what people have done to us, and we'll tell anyone who will listen. There's a difference between sharing your testimony to help someone and talking about what's been done to you because you are angry about it.

Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat.

The worst part of all is that, without forgiveness, bitterness is all that is left

Forgiveness is abandoning your right to revenge.

Forgiveness is something that we are often asked to grant and very few of us ever have the roadmap of how to get from the pain that we have experienced to being able to forgive someone.

I can forgive, I just can't forget.

You can't stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh.

Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.

When we have been badly injured and clearly wronged, we make an instant caricature of the person who did it to us. We define him totally by the one wrong he did.