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Forgiveness Quotes by Desmond Tutu

48 Forgiveness quotes by Desmond Tutu

All Forgiveness quotes Desmond Tutu’s page

Desmond Tutu explains that forgiveness starts with admitting the hurt and seeing the other person’s repentance. He says a world without forgiveness has no future, and that forgiveness is a practical, political act, not just a kind gesture. He also urges us to practice forgiveness with friends, family, strangers, and even ourselves.

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To forgive is not just to be altruistic.

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Forgiving is good for your health.

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No future without forgiveness.

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Without forgiveness, there is no future.

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Forgiving is not easy. It is not cheap.

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Without forgiveness, there's no future. --Desmond Tutu

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Forgiveness is abandoning your right to revenge.

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Forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence.

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Forgiving is a gift to the forgiver as well as to the perpetrator.

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Forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up and get up with dignity, to begin anew.

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“But just as we do not forgive for others, we also do not forgive for God.”

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Forgiveness is not generally something that you find as a coin to be used by politicians.

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Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.

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You don't think we have a copyright to forgiveness, it is done by people everywhere.

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Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations.

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“order to truly forgive oneself, one must either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that one’s behavior was wrong and accept responsibility or blame…

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Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that…

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If forgiving depended on the culprit owning up, then the victim would always be at the mercy of the perpetrator. The victim…

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As the victim, you offer the gift of your forgiving to the perpetrator who may or may not appropriate the gift but…

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Those of us who came to be Christians get to remember that forgiveness cost God the death of God's son. It's an…

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There will be no future without forgiveness. Any process of peace is bound to collapse if this is missing. There is no…

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To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest…

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Forgiveness is something that we are often asked to grant and very few of us ever have the roadmap of how to…

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“Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew.…

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When I talk of forgiveness I mean the belief that you can come out the other side ... a better person than…

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I don't struggle to forgive people. I find it quite easy to forgive people for the harms that they have inflicted on…

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“Transformation begins in you, wherever you are, whatever has happened, however you are suffering. Transformation is always possible. We do not heal…

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Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering--remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new…

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“Once you have been able to forgive, the final step is to either renew or release the relationship you have with the…

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True reconciliation is never cheap, for it is based on forgiveness which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has…

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True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible. We cannot go on nursing grudges even…

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We can carry the burden of hurt throughout our lives. We can make the hurt that we have experienced the defining aspect…

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I have heard and seen many examples of the cruelty that we are able to visit on one another during my time.…

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“Forgiveness does not relieve someone of responsibility for what they have done. Forgiveness does not erase accountability. It is not about turning…

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Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are.…

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We must not only speak about forgiveness and reconciliation, we must act on these principles.

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Without memory, there is no healing. Without forgiveness, there is no future.

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

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Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the…

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Without forgiveness, there is no future. Forgiveness is not nebulous, impractical and idealistic. It's thoroughly realistic. It's real political in the long…

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More by Desmond Tutu

Each of us is precious to God because each of us has their name written on the palms of God's hands. And God says…

Freedom and liberty lose out by default because good people are not vigilant.

We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black…

Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I'm quite shy.

Too many people think that reconciliation means you soft-pedal differences.

Our Christian faith is actually very subversive of the conventional notion of success - the notion that what invests a person with worth is…

Every situation of justice is an occasion where someone is being humiliated and they want to restore their dignity.

Race should not be used to claim privileges and rights for one group, exclusively, which are denied other different groups. Then that is an…

People are able to justify immense cruelty and say that it is something that is sanctioned by their faith.

South Africa, so utterly improbably, is a beacon of hope in a dark and troubled world.

I don't often want to speak. I try to be a reasonable person and to be diplomatic, but you go to that place and…

“child of God, known by name and whose very hairs are numbered. Praise and adore God and thank him for ever and ever. Amen.”

To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice.

It's a fantastic thing that from moment to the next moment if God were to have stopped for a split second we would disintegrate…

Once lost, trust can only be regained if we are as good as our word.