Henri Nouwen Quotes

It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.

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.

When I forgive other people, I let them go, I free them from my ignorance. And as soon as I do, I feel lighter, brighter and better.

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.

Forgive yourself. The supreme act of forgiveness is when you can forgive yourself for all the wounds you've created in your own life. Forgiveness is an act of self-love. When you forgive yourself, self-acceptance begins and self-love grows.

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people. But until you heal the wounds of your past, you are going to bleed.

Forgiveness is a gift to myself. I forgive, and I set myself free.

When true forgiveness happens it is one of the most astonishing and liberating of the human experience.

Forgiveness allows us to live in the sunlight of the present, not the darkness of the past. Forgiveness alone, of all our human actions, opens up the world to the miracle of infinite possibility.

The weight is off my shoulders. I don't live in the past anymore. I look forward, instead of back.

People spend thousands in therapy digging and digging in the past. When you dig and dig, you find relics. Try to forgive yourself and get back on that ride.

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.

An honorable spiritual practice recognizes the losses we have suffered, tells our story, and sheds our tears to free us from the past.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

Just remember, forgiveness is a way of setting yourself free of the bondage put on you by others. There is liberty to he had in it.

Love resolves. Love. Love's deeper than the hurt.

People say time heals all wounds. Let me tell you, time heals nothing. You can do the wrong thing for 10 years and it doesn't equal the right thing for one day.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.

The most important thing that I learned in growing up is that forgiveness is something that, when you do it, you free yourself to move on.

We all have our demons. When we finally learn to let them go, we get to live and be free.

The heart of who I am as a person and as a man is forgiveness, after forgiving my father for a lot of things that were done when I was child.

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