Love Quote by Corrie ten Boom

"Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him....Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness....And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself"

Corrie ten Boom, Celebrity

About this Quote

Forgiveness here isn t a polished virtue; it s a crisis of the nervous system. Ten Boom starts with the physicality of hatred - thoughts boiling - then refuses the comforting lie that righteous suffering automatically produces righteousness. The line "Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?" is the moral trapdoor: it collapses the speaker s claim to special exemption. If the cross is really universal, it includes the person who harmed you. That s the scandal, and she doesn t soften it.

The subtext is a quiet dismantling of modern self help forgiveness, the kind that treats healing as a personal achievement badge. Ten Boom admits failure in plain speech - "I cannot forgive him" - and that confession is the pivot. She reframes forgiveness less as emotional sincerity and more as borrowed power, almost like spiritual outsourcing: if love is commanded, love must also be supplied. It s a theology of dependency dressed as a survival strategy.

Context matters: Ten Boom, a Holocaust survivor who helped hide Jews, is writing from a world where "enemy" is not metaphor. That gives the passage its hard credibility. The intent isn t to shame trauma into compliance; it s to locate healing somewhere other than the wounded self. By shifting the hinge of the world s repair from "our goodness" to "His", she offers a psychologically bracing idea: you don t have to manufacture sanctity out of ash. You only have to stop pretending you can.

Quote Details

Topic	Forgiveness
Source	Verified source: The Hiding Place (Corrie ten Boom, 1971) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself. (Chapter 15: "A Rabbi in the Cellar" (often paginated around p. 248 in later Chosen Books editions; exact page varies by edition)). This passage is from Corrie ten Boom’s memoir (as told with John & Elizabeth Sherrill) describing her postwar encounter with a former Ravensbrück guard at a church service in Munich. Multiple secondary references attribute the full passage specifically to The Hiding Place (1971). AZQuotes provides an edition-specific locator used widely by sermons and citation snippets (e.g., “p.248, Chosen Books”), but the primary/first publication is the 1971 book (originally published by Fleming H. Revell). Page numbers vary by edition, so to verify a page number with high confidence you must check the specific printing you are citing (Revell 1971 first edition vs. later Chosen Books reprints).
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