Corrie Ten Boom Quotes

“Oh Father! Betsie! If I had known, would I have gone ahead? Could I have done the things I did?”

“The man’s face and body told the story more eloquently than his words: pain-haunted eyes, shaking hands that could not forget.”

″... this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”

“Somehow, out of the watch shop that never made money, he fed and dressed eleven more children after his own four were grown.”

“Happiness isn’t’ something that depends on our surroundings, Corrie. It’s something we make inside ourselves.”

“Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”

“I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this- places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.”

“This was evil’s hour: we could not run from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.”

“Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father’s secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn’t know they were there.”

“And then, incredibly, Betsie began to pray for the Germans up there in the planes, caught in the fist of the giant evil loose in Germany.”

“That’s why he sometimes shows us things, you know- to tell us that this too is in His hands.”

″‘Those poor people,’ Father echoed. But to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the soldiers now forming into ranks to march away. ‘I pity the poor Germans, Corrie. They have touched the apple of God’s eye.‘”

“How should a Christian act when evil was in power?”

“For I, too, had a hiding place when things were bad. Jesus was this place, the Rock cleft for me.”

“It is possible that I appear to you a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”

“How can we thank him? We have no power to do him any service. Lord, allow us to share this inheritance from our father with him as well. Take him too, and his family, into Your constant care.”

“The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God.”

“You say we could lose our lives for this child? I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”

“Mama’s love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us.”

“When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need--just in time.”

“Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.”