To start off, here is a thoughtful question from R. Buckminster Fuller which all the quotes answer.- "If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depends on how I am and what I do, how would I be ? What would I do?"
"I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him."
- Booker T. Washington
"Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? "Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
- Jesus - Matthew7:3&5
"Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back -- in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."
-Frederick Buechner
"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."
-Thomas a Kempis
"You know you have forgiven someone when he or she has harmless passage through your mind."
- Rev. Karyl Huntley
"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible. We cannot go on nursing grudges even vicariously for those who cannot speak for themselves any longer. We have to accept that we do what we do for generations past, present and yet to come. That is what makes a community a community or a people a people - for better or for worse.
- Desmond Mpilo Tutu, from: No Future Without Forgiveness
"If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing you resent, you will he free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don't really want it for them, and your prayers are only words and you don't mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks and you will find you have come to mean it and want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love."
- The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous
We must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. - Reinhold Niebuhr
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."
- Lewis B. Smedes
When
we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves,
or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our
own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison
to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another
person. It disables a person's emotional resources. The challenge
.. is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves
and to develop the power of forgiveness.
- Caroline Myss, PH.D., Anatomy
of the Spirit
Forgiveness
is not a matter of feeling superior, of feeling sorry for our
parents because they didn't' know any better. It comes when
we understand that as humans we all do the very best we can,
and we can't ask for more than that. Forgiveness is making the
choice to find no more value in anger, and to see that we are
all God's light, all joined, and the separations we feel are
only part of the illusions of the ego.
- Gerald G. Jampolsky, MD, Out
of the Darkness into the Light
Forgiveness
is not the misguided act of condoning irresponsible, hurtful
behavior. Nor is it a superficial turning of the other cheek
that leaves us feeling victimized and martyred. Rather it is
the finishing of old business that allows us to experience the
present, free of contamination from the past.
- Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., Fire
In The Soul
The
choice to follow love through to its completion is the choice
to seek completion within
ourselves. The point at which
we shut down on others is the point at which we shut down on
life. We heal as we heal others,
and we heal others by extending our perceptions past their
weaknesses. Until we have seen
someone's darkness, we don't really know who that person is.
Until we have forgiven someone's
darkness, we don't really know what love is. Forgiving
others is the only way to forgive
ourselves, and forgiveness is our greatest need.
- Marianne Williamson, Illuminata
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