19 quotes
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. . . . As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove! I'm being humble", and almost immediately pride — pride at his own humility — will appear.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others — you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Feed him on minor poets and fifthrate novelists until you have made him believe that “Love” is irresistible. . . . There must be several young women who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"—in hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
The Screwtape Letters (1942)