Jacques Barzun Quotes

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.

If you cannot free people from their wrongs and see them as the needy people they are, you enslave yourself to your own painful past and by fastening yourself to the past, you let your hate become your future.

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

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.

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

Forgiveness is the key that can unshackle us from a past that will not rest in the grave of things over and done with. As long as our minds are captive to the memory of having been wronged, they are not free to wish for reconciliation with the one who wronged us.

Don't ignore the past, but deal with it, on your own pace. Once you deal with it, you are free of it; and you are free to embrace your life and be a happy loving person because if you don't, the past will come back to haunt and keep coming back to haunt you.

You break free when you feel neither beneath anyone nor superior to anyone, when you shed the need to control other people, when you create space for others to be who they are and for your real self to be what it is.

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.

Forgiveness is a stunning principle, your ticket out of hate and fear and chaos. ... I know what regret feels like; I've earned my credentials. But I also know what forgiveness feels like, because God has so graciously forgiven me.

Forgiving the past means remembering the love there, and releasing all the rest as the illusion that it really was.

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.

Forgiveness is a CHOICE, not a feeling.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, it's accepting the past for what it was, and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.

Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.

A life lived without forgiveness is a prison.

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.

Many people want payback and to see others suffer. Forgiveness is the key to freedom. You can choose to be enslaved and burdened or you can choose to be free. It's a choice. Forgiveness is a state of being. So once you do it, it alters who you are and the way you can be in the world.

Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind...And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again...Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory Forgiving sets you free.

We attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt, endowing it with immortality. And we let it assault us every time it comes to mind. It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die-for it is a parasite sucking OUR blood, not theirs. There is only one remedy for it. [forgiveness]

If you do not for give you actually are tying yourself to the perpetrator, that you are going to live your life as a victim. And you won't experience a liberation that comes from forgiving.

Once we have forgiven, however, we get a new freedom to forget. This time forgetting is a sign of health; it is not a trick to avoid spiritual surgery. We can forget because we have been healed. But even if it is easier to forget after we forgive, we should not make forgetting a test of our forgiving. The test of forgiving lies with healing the lingering pain of the past, not with forgetting the past has ever happened.

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.