Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it.

Mason Cooley (1927–2002) was an American aphorist best known for compact, paradox-tinged observations about moral life, belief, and self-knowledge. This line belongs to the kind of reflective, secular wisdom Cooley cultivated in his published notebooks of aphorisms, where he often treats ethical virtues not as single heroic acts but as habits requiring maintenance. The comparison to faith suggests a modern context in which belief and moral resolve are experienced as unstable—subject to fatigue, resentment, and relapse—so that forgiveness must be repeatedly renewed rather than achieved once and for all.

The aphorism frames forgiveness as a continuing practice rather than a definitive event. Like faith, it can wane under pressure: old injuries resurface, new provocations accumulate, and the mind replays grievances. Cooley’s point is that forgiving is less a final verdict on the past than an ongoing discipline of attention—choosing, again and again, not to let resentment govern one’s actions. The analogy also implies that forgiveness involves an element of trust or commitment that cannot be fully proven or secured; it must be “revived” through repeated intention, much as faith is sustained through renewal rather than certainty.