Desmond Tutu Quotes

Forgiveness is a CHOICE, not a feeling.

I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.

Forgiveness is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself. If you can't learn to forgive, you can forget about achieving true success in your life.

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

You must forgive the people who hurt you so you can get out of prison. You'll never be free until you do. Let go of hose wrongs they've done to you. Get that bitterness out of your life. That's the only way you're going to truly be free. You will be amazed at what can happen in your life when you release all that poison.

Nothing brings families together faster than forgiveness. That should make it Step No. 1, but most of us find forgiving hard. We associate it with weakness and losing when, actually, the reverse is true. When you forgive, you gain strength and come out a winner. You break free of control by the other person's actions.

To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that Liberates.

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

Forgiveness is first for you, the forgiver...to release you from something that will eat you alive; that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly. Do you think this man cares about the pain and torment you have gone through? If anything, he feeds on that knowledge. Don't you want to cut that off? And in doing so, you'll release him from a burden that he carries whether he knows it or not--acknowledges it or not.

Forgiveness is not something that you do for someone else; it's something you do for yourself, To forgive is not to condone, it is to refuse to continue feeling bad about an injury.

Forgiving doesn't make the person who hurt you feel better, it makes you feel better.

You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness and give him over to me so that my love will burn from his life every vestige of corruption.

Forgetting is something that time takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.

Forgiveness makes you feel better. As soon as you forgive, you're free.

Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves that allows us to get on with our lives instead of being trapped in the past by resentment.

Forgiveness is a stunning principle, your ticket out of hate and fear and chaos.

Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.

I think one should forgive and remember .... If you forgive and forget in the usual sense, you're just driving what you remember into the subconscious; it stays there and festers. But to look, even regularly, upon what you remember and know you've forgiven is achievement.

I think forgiveness is probably one of the greatest forms of self-love there is because you don't do forgiveness for anybody else. My captors will never care if I forgive them... It will not make a day of difference to them at all, but it will make a huge difference to me.

Life without forgiveness is unbearable.

One of my biggest lessons in life is, we heal at the speed of our forgiveness.

My idea of forgiveness is letting go of resentment that does not serve your better interest, ridding yourself of negative thoughts. All they do is make you miserable. Believe me, you can fret and fume all you want, but whoever it was that wronged you is not suffering from your anguish whatsoever.

The very person you find it hardest to forgive is the one you need to let go of the most. Forgiveness means letting go. It has nothing to do with condoning behavior, it's just letting the whole thing go. We do not have to know how to forgive. All we need to do is be willing to forgive. The Universe will take care of the hows.

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.

And without forgiveness, there is never any peace.