"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
— Mahatma Gandhi (An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth)

"Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
— C.S. Lewis

"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. "
— Rita Mae Brown

"I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?"
— Gordon B. Hinckley (Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes)

"Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasinly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"To Err is human, forgive divine."
— Alexander Pope

"Forgiveness has nothing to do with absolving a criminal of his crime. It has everything to do with relieving oneself of the burden of being a victim--letting go of the pain and transforming oneself from victim to survivor."
— C R Strahan

"Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots keeping itself alive."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it."
— Confucius

"in the bible it says you have to forgive seventy times seven. i want you all to know, i'm keeping a chart."
— Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself."
— Harriet Nelson

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

""There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love."

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— Bryant H. McGill

"Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another. "
— Emma Goldman

"When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.

-- Ron Franz"
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"With time and perspective we recognize that such problems in life do come for a purpose, if only to allow the one who faces such despair to be convinced that he really does need divine strength beyond himself, that she really does need the offer of heaven’s hand. Those who feel no need for mercy usually never seek it and almost never bestow it. Those who have never had a heartache or a weakness or felt lonely or forsaken never have had to cry unto heaven for relief of such personal pain. Surely it is better to find the goodness of God and the grace of Christ, even at the price of despair, than to risk living our lives in a moral or material complacency that has never felt any need for faith or forgiveness, any need for redemption or relief."
— Elder Jeffery R. Holland

"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions."
— Zen Master Dogen

"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 (The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons)

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness"
— Norman Cousins

"…she eventually forgave him, because she understood him."
— Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt)

"It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much."
— George Eliot

"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 to yourself."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance."
— Adlai Stevenson

"It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries - to be reconciled and clasp hands in amity."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"You'll have to learn to forgive," he said. "For if you don't, you know what will happen?"
"What, Doctor?" I croaked, for my outburst had exhausted me.
"It will destroy you," he said as he handed me the tea.
A tear came into my eye when he said it for I knew it was true and I would have loved to be able to do it (not because of its destroying me but because it was right, and deep down I knew that) but I couldn't and the more I thought of it the more the blood came coursing to my head so that whenever I'd write I'd find myself clutching the pencil so tight I broke the lead how many times I don't know, hundreds."
— Patrick McCabe (Breakfast on Pluto)

"Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!"
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.
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— Acts 13:38

"It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"Sir Thomas More was a victim of injustice and irony. Generously and meekly, just as he was about to be martyred, he said:

Paul . . . was present, and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they [Stephen and Paul] now both twain Holy Saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends for ever, so I verily trust and . . . pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation. [Anthony Kenny, Thomas More (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 88]
Quoted by Neal A Maxwell in "Meek and Lowly", BYU Speeches, 21 Oct 1986
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— Neal A. Maxwell

"Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other -- and land, of course. "
— Alexander McCall Smith (The Good Husband of Zebra Drive)