Forgiveness Lady FORGIVENESS is the Only Way to Peace

All the years you have waited for them to “make it up to you” and all the energy you expended trying to make them change (or make them pay) kept the old wounds from healing and gave pain from the past free rein to shape and even damage your life. And still they may not have changed. Nothing you have done has made them change. Indeed, they may never change. Inner peace is found by changing yourself, not the people who hurt you. And you change yourself for yourself, for the joy, serenity, peace of mind, understanding, compassion, laughter, and bright future that you get.”
Lewis B. Smedes – The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How

You can forgive someone almost anything. But you cannot tolerate everything…We don’t have to tolerate what people do just because we forgive them for doing it. Forgiving heals us personally. To tolerate everything only hurts us all in the long run.
Lewis B. Smedes

One knows forgiveness has been accomplished when the thought of the perpetrator no longer conjures up, hate, rage or jealousy.
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Let us forgive each other – only then will we live in peace.
Leo Tolstoy

We may not know how to forgive, and we may not want to forgive; but the very fact we say we are willing to forgive begins the healing practice.
Louise Hay

A heart filled with anger has no room for love.
Unknown

One forgives to the degree that one loves.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

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]
Lewis B Smede    
Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

Forgiveness is the final form of love.
Reinhold Niebuhr