Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Forgiveness)

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”—British novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1941)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dag Hammarskjold, on Forgiveness and Sacrifice)

“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.” — U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961), diary entry for Apr. 17, 1960, in Markings, translated by Leif Sjoeberg and W.H. Auden (1965) 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Charlotte Bronte, on Forgiveness)

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs." ― English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)

In her classic novel, Charlotte Bronte puts these words in the mouth of Helen Burns, a fellow student of Jane's at the abusive Lowood School, who not only stands for loyalty and friendship, but also the possibilities of Christianity for patience, acceptance and tolerance.

Those were excellent qualities to emulate in Bronte’s turbulent early Victorian Era, and they remain so in our equally disruptive if faster-passed time.

(The image accompanying this post shows a very young Elizabeth Taylor as Helen in the 1944 Hollywood adaptation of Jane Eyre.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Anne Lamott, on Forgiveness)

“Sometimes faith looks like myopia: I don’t see faults so clearly as I used to...one of the most important gifts of spiritual faith is forgiveness, and I have grudgingly tugged this gift open over many years, and many hurts, until empathy for the other person has become almost a reflex. I have also grown better at recognizing when I’m the one in need of forgiveness. Most surprisingly, though, I have learned to forgive myself for most of my disappointing character traits and iffier decisions.”— Novelist-essayist Anne Lamott, “Have a Little Faith,” AARP Magazine, December 2014/January 2015

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Soren Kierkegaard, on Christ’s Love and Forgiveness)

“Christ speaks of two debtors, one of whom owed much and the other little, and who both found forgiveness. He asks: Which of these two ought to love more? The answer: The one who has forgiven much. When you love much, you are forgiven much—and when you are forgiven much, you love much. See here the blessed recurrence of salvation in love!” — Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), “Two Discourses at Friday Communion” (August 1851), in The Essential Kierkegaard, edited by Howard and Edna Hong (2000)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on How We Are Saved by Faith, Hope and Love)

“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 as 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.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Irony of American History (1952)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Lewis Smedes, on God and Forgiveness)

“Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And he invites us all to forgive each other.”—American theologian—and pioneer in forgiveness research—Lewis Smedes (1920-2002), Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurt We Don’t Deserve (1984)

Quote of the Day (St. Philip Neri, on Forgiveness)

“If a man finds it very hard to forgive injuries, let him look at a crucifix, and think that Christ has shed all His Blood for him, and not only forgave his enemies, but even prayed to his Heavenly Father to forgive them also.” —Catholic missionary St. Philip Neri (1515-1595), quoted in Pietro Giacomo Bacci, The Life of Saint Philip Neri, Apostle of Rome, and Founder of the Congregation of the Oratory (1847)

Quote of the Day (St. Augustine, on ‘Forgiveness From the Heart’)

“There are many kinds of alms, by which, when we do them, we are helped in obtaining forgiveness of our own sins. But none of these alms is greater than the forgiveness from the heart of a sin committed against us by someone else.”—St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Enchiridion: Being a Treatise on Faith, Hope and Love, translated by Professor J. F. Shaw (1883)

Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on God’s Understanding and Love)

“God knows quite well how hard we find it to love Him more than anyone or anything else, and He won't be angry with us as long as we are trying. And He will help us.”— English Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), May 6, 1955 letter to “Mrs. K” about her son Laurence, in C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children, edited by Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1996)

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on Forgiveness)

“It’s all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?” — Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy (1926)

Quote of the Day (Archbishop Tutu, on Forgiveness as ‘The Best Form of Self-Interest’)

“When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberators. We don’t forgive to help the other person. We don’t forgive for others. We forgive for ourselves. Forgiveness, in other words, is the best form of self-interest. This is true both spiritually and scientifically.”— Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World (2014)

(Photo of Archbishop Tutu taken by Elke Wetzig at the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag in Cologne 2007.)