This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"True forgiveness is not an action after the fact, it is an attitude with which you enter each moment." - David Ridge
"Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practice in himself can willingly believe in another." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken ismade whole again, what is soiled is made clean." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you - out of love - takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice, is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences yourself." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Forgiveness is not a once-in-a-lifetime task, it is ongoing. It is our spiritual maintenance plan. Forgiveness helps to keep us at peace and in touch with our love. Our only task is to try to open our hearts again." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Life hands us lessons, universal truths teaching us the basics about love, fear, time, power, loss, happiness, relationships, (guilt, anger, forgiveness, surrender, patience, play, loss) and authenticity. We are not unhappy today because of the complexities of life. We are unhappy because we miss its underlying simplicities." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Forgiveness is the most necessary and proper work of every man; for, though, when I do not a just thing, or a charitable, or a wise, another man may do it for me, yet no man can forgive my enemy but myself." - George Herbert
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom." - Hannah Arendt
"“I can forgive, but I cannot forget,” is only another way of saying “I will not forgive.” A forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man." - Henry Ward Beecher
""I can forgive but I cannot forget" is only another way of saying "I will not forgive." Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two and burned up so that it can never be shown against one." - Henry Ward Beecher
"“I can forgive, but I cannot forget,” is only another way of saying, “I will not forgive.” A forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it can never be shown against the man." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Keep the home near heaven. Let it face toward the Father’s house. Not only let the day begin and end with God, with mercies acknowledged and forgiveness sought, but let it be seen and felt that God is your chiefest joy, His will in all you do the absolute and sufficient reason." - James Hamilton
"Forgiveness is one of the least understood of all spiritual practices. It has nothing to do with condoning poor behavior in ourselves and others. Rather, it calls us to responsibility. In forgiving ourselves, we make the journey from guilt for what we have done (or not done) to celebration of what we become." - Joan Borysenko
"Great souls forgive not injuries till time has put their enemies within their power, that they may show forgiveness is their own." - John Dryden
"Forgiveness to the injur'd does belong, but they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong." - John Dryden
"The "morphogenic" relationship of eternity to time is not to be thought of as sequential. Moreover, eternity being by definition outside or beyond temporality, transcendent of all categories, whether of virtue or of reason (being and nonbeing, unity and multiplicity, love and justice, forgiveness and wrath), the term and concept "God" is itself but a metaphor of the unknowing mind, connotative, not only beyond itself, but beyond thought... metaphors are equivalent as alternative signs of the high mystical experience of an absorption of mortal appearance in immortal being; for which another historical figure of speech is the "End of the World."" - Joseph Campbell
"Forgiveness is a state of mind, a way to live in the present moment, which means to allow each instant to pass without carrying negative elements over into the next. You can knock down your little child time and again and he or she will get up and come back, trusting and open-armed, time and again. We must backtrack, recapitulate, and realize we have no choice except to say yes to the heart. There is no judgment involved; it is a simple matter of frequency and sync." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Forgiveness is the highest and most difficult of all moral lessons." - Joseph Jacobs
"There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"The forgiveness of the world can only be accomplished by the judgment of the world." - Ralph Washington Sockman
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"Without forgiveness life is governed by… an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation." - Roberto Assagioli
"There is no transgression too serious for my forgiveness." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now history has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities. Think now she gives when our attention is distracted and what she gives, gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late what’s not believed in, or if still believed, in memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with till the refusal propagates a fear. Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. " - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"One should forgive, under any injury. It hath been said that the continuation of the species is due to man’s being forgiving. Forgiveness is holiness; by forgiveness the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the Self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue." - Mahabharata or The Mahabharata NULL
"Revenge is not always better, but neither is forgiveness; learn to know them both, son, so that there be no problem. Son, a man who is always forgiving finds many things wrong; his servants despise him, and so do outsiders. No creatures ever bow to him, and that is why the learned criticize being always forgiving." - Mahabharata or The Mahabharata NULL
"Hate is death, forgiveness is life. Forgiveness works the miracle of change. When Lincoln was asked whey he did not destroy his enemies he replied: “If I make my enemies my friends, don’t I then destroy them?”... Forgiveness is the way to personal peace." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Forgiveness is not a moral issue. It is an energy dynamic... Forgiveness means that you do not carry the baggage of an experience. When you choose not to forgive, the experience that you do not forgive sticks with you. When you choose not to forgive, it is like agreeing to wear dark, gruesome sunglasses that distort everything, and it is you who are forced every day to look at life through those contaminated lenses because you have chosen to keep them. " - Gary Zukav
"When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge." - Gerald G. Jampolsky
"Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions." - Gerald G. Jampolsky
"Forgiveness is the economy of the heart. Forgiveness saves expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits. " - Hannah More
"It's cheaper to pardon than to resent. Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, and the waste of spirit." - Hannah More
"Let forgiveness be the substitute for fear. This is the only rule for happy dreams." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
"Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
"Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare" - Lance Morrow
"Let forgiveness be the substitute for fear. This is the only rule for happy dreams." - A Course In Miracles, aka ACIM
"Prayer is a way of asking for something. It is the medium of miracles. But the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness, because those who have been forgiven have everything. Once forgiveness has been accepted, prayer in the usual sense becomes utterly meaningless. The prayer for forgiveness is nothing more than a request that you may be able to recognize what you already have." - A Course In Miracles, aka ACIM
"One can't relive one's life. Forgiveness is not what's difficult; one's always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that's obvious." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
"The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world." - Marianne Williamson
"I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"People ask God for forgiveness. But since God is everything and everyone, who is there for Him to forgive? Forgiveness of the created was already there in His act of creation. But still people ask God's forgiveness, and He forgives them. But they, instead of forgetting that for which they asked forgiveness, forget that God has forgiven them, and instead, remember the things they were forgiven - and so nourish the seed of wrongdoing, and it bears its fruit again." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"The more you make yourselves humble and ask for forgiveness, the more your true exaltedness is seen. Humility is a sign of exaltedness. The preface of a spotlessly pure heart (Iman-Islam) is patience (sabur), contentment and gratitude (shakur), having trust in God (tawakkal), and praising Him for everything that happens to us, saying, “Al-hamdu lillah!” Therefore, without feeling shame, ask forgiveness whenever necessary. This will be good. Allah, the Lone One who rules and sustains (Allahu ta’ala Nayan), will protect you and me." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen