When the going gets tough, the tough get going. But even the toughest among us need to show ourselves a little grace, patience, and understanding amid trying times.
Grace can best be described as extending an act of kindness or generosity to someone else (or to ourselves) as a way to invite ease into difficult situations. It’s an ineffable concept in some ways, but examples can be seen everywhere: in an offer to help pick up groceries for an overworked neighbor, in a parent’s choice to laugh with a child over their blunder instead of reprimanding them, or in the act of forgiving yourself for doing poorly in a job interview.
Showing others grace helps establish deeper, more understanding relationships and softens the oft-transactional nature of our world. Kindness doesn’t cost us a thing, and yet it’s often rarer to come by than it should be. Showing ourselves grace, too, helps us remember we’re only human.
Below, we’ve rounded up 10 quotes that can serve as reminders to show and have more grace for one another. We’re all just trying our best, after all.
I feel that the essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others.Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Having a gentle spirit, a kind spirit, a compassionate spirit toward oneself and others really does make space for the growth and the teachability that keeps us moving into the direction that we want to go. It’s not always easy to hold that kind of compassion and kindness for oneself, but to me that’s often where the work is.Tracee Ellis Ross
When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.Brené Brown
The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away. There is nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.John Connolly
Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.Philip Yancey
Love is holy because it is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.Marilynne Robinson
Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.Frederick Buechner
Grace is beauty in motion, or rather grace regulates the air, the attitudes and movements of beauty.Henry Fuseli
Grace has been defined the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.William Hazlitt
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Featured image credit: Kevin Mazur/ WireImage via Getty images
