SO GOOD QUOTES

Author: SO GOOD QUOTES

  • Even if our mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or friend couldn’t love us in every way we might have liked, Père Thomas began to show me that each one did reflect an aspect of God’s love, and when taken together they reflected the fullness of God in a way I had often missed in focusing on what each one was not able to offer.

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

    However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least, they’ll show their love of you.

    —Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Remember people’s love for you and their good past with you, whenever you are fought by doubts of their sincerity and whenever you see them erring against you, for then their past love will intercede for them and your anger will subside.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

    I felt miserable because I had failed so many times in the past to respond to her help, to accept the warmth and love she tried to give me. Another wave of loneliness overcame me as I considered the times when I fought her, hated her, and pushed her away from me.

    …

    This was my mother; the word “mother” brings on a flow of feeling and past experiences and years of living together, loving together, and hating, too. The fighting and conflicts do not seem important anymore, the arguments and intense pains and emotions that clouded the relationship have evaporated. This was my mother, and I realize the uniqueness of our relationship.

    …

    In her dying, I was able to become open to myself and to my mother, to claim our relationship, to look back upon the past in quick moments while at her bedside and realize the times she did give me warmth and love, and the times when pain and emotional conflict blocked the giving and the receiving.

    —Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

    Even if some people are foul and have reached the extremes of evil, often they have done one or two or three good things…. We ought to suspect the same also in the case of good people. Just as the most worthless people often do something good, so those who are earnest and virtuous often fail completely in some other respect.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

  • It is very wrong that you do not love your mother, and harbor this feeling of suspicion against her. Pray for the strength, the courage, the goodness, to forgive. You must stop these endless recriminations, this reverting to this endless dwelling on-her mistaken attitude to you in the past. Accept that past as part of God’s pattern for your life, and forget your grudge. Forget it all. In keeping keen within you this hostility to your past and to the tools that shaped it, you are only waging war against the will of God. What folly!

    Besides, you cannot honestly consider your fate to be a hard one. There have been bitter moments, I know. But, surely, the right thing to do is to forget them and train yourself to think of no one as their author, of no one as the one person responsible for them. Seen from on high, men are nought but instruments in the hand of God.

    LETTERS OF ELDER MACARIUS OF OPTINA

  • “Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.”

    —Robert Brault

  • “I tried never to go to sleep while I kept a grievance against anyone. Nor did I let anyone go to sleep while he had a grievance against me.”

    —Agatho

    The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks
    Benedicta Ward

  • We want to collect debts [that we think others owe us] because we do not believe that our debt hasn’t been fully canceled [by the Lord].

    Begin to stop trying to collect debts [of all kinds] from others. Your damaged emotions are making you get revenge. Release the debt. Release the debt the same way God has released your debt – you do not need to pay Him back.

    —Fr. Paul Girguis

  • I have seen people flaring up madly and vomiting their long-stored malice, who by their very passion were delivered from passion, and who have obtained from their offender either penitence or an explanation of the long standing grievance. I have seen others who seemed to show a brute patience, but who were nourishing resentment within them under the cover of silence.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “Forgive me for all the things I did, but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

    —Donna Tartt, The Secret History

  • There is no perfect family. We don’t have perfect parents, we are not perfect, we don’t get married with a perfect person nor do we have perfect kids. We have complaints of each other. We were disappointed in each other. Therefore, there is no healthy marriage or healthy family without the exercise of forgiveness. Forgiveness is vital to our emotional health and spiritual survival. Without forgiveness the family becomes a theatre of conflict and a bastion of grievances. Without forgiveness the family gets sick. Forgiveness is the sterilization of the soul, the cleaning of the mind and the liberation of the heart. Who does not forgive has no peace of soul nor communion with God. The pain is a poison that intoxicates and kills. Save a wound of the heart is a self-destructive gesture. It is autophagy. Who does not forgive sickens physically, emotionally, and spiritually. That’s why the family has to be a place of life and not of death; territory of healing and not of disease; stage of forgiveness and not of guilt. Forgiveness brings joy where sorrow produced pain; and healing, where pain caused disease.

    —Pope Francis

  • When we see a person who has committed vicious sins and crimes escaping with impunity, we react with indignation. We want to see that person called to account and punished, and feel angry that this has not happened. But at such moments we should reflect on our own actions; indeed we should turn that sense of indignation inward against ourselves. Each of us should ask: “How many sins have I committed against others, when I have escaped with impunity?” There are, no doubt, many examples in all our cases. Recognizing this fact will cause our anger against others to melt away. More importantly, it will make us turn to God and ask forgiveness of these sins. Yet there is perhaps a difference between our own sins and the sins which we notice in others. Our own sins are probably quite subtle and inconspicuous, whereas the sins of others are obvious and gross. Should we, therefore, regard our own sins as less important or die? On the contrary, we should realize that subtle sins are frequently the most harmful. Obvious sins, such as robber and violence, are easily recognized, and so can often be guarded against by physical means. The more subtle sins, such as lying and slander and power-mongering are frequently hard to spot, and so difficult to prevent.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply

  • “The degree to which one blames one’s parents is the degree to which one is still stuck in the family of origin, is still a child.”

    —David Augsburger, Helping People Forgive