Desmond Tutu Quotes

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

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act despite it.

We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.

Life is more than breath and a heartbeat; meaning and purpose are the life of life.

The fundamental law of human beings is interdependence. A person is a person through other persons.

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders. What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.

Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.

God has such a deep reverence for our freedom that he'd rather let us freely go to Hell than be compelled to go to Heaven.

To be impartial... is indeed to have taken sides already... with the status quo.

Meet me here
Speak my name
I am not your enemy
I am your teacher
I may even be your friend
Let us tell our truth together, you and I
My name is anger: I say you have been wronged
My name is shame: my story is your hidden pain
My name is fear: my story is vulnerability
My name is resentment: I say things should have been different
My name is grief
My name is depression
My name is heartache
My name is anxiety
I have many names
And many lessons
I am not your enemy
I am your teacher

...the cycle of reprisal and counter reprisal that had characterized their national history had to be broken and that the only way to do this was to go beyond retributive justice to restorative justice, to move on to forgiveness, because without it there was no future.

Like humility, generosity comes from seeing that everything we have and everything we accomplish comes from God’s grace and God’s love for us… Certainly it is from experiencing this generosity of God and the generosity of those in our life that we learn gratitude and to be generous to others. - God Has a Dream, p. 86.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

God's dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

We prayed earnestly that God would bless our land and would confound the machinations of the children of darkness. There had been so many moments in the past, during the dark days of apartheid’s vicious awfulness, when we had preached, “This is God’s world and God is in charge!” Sometimes, when evil seemed to be on the rampage and about to overwhelm goodness, one had held on to this article of faith by the skin of one’s teeth. It was a kind of theological whistling in the dark and one was frequently tempted to whisper in God’s ear, “For goodness’ sake, why don’t You make it more obvious that You are in charge?