Screwtape Letters

Quotes from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis:
(No, I did not copy the entire book!)

“Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to ‘do it on their own.’” ~ 7

“We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants me to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” ~ 25

“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust h is benevolence out to the remote circumference, to the people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largly imaginary.” ~ 28

“Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but was ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘ortorn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the church.” ~ 31

“When humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians on the other hand, when they believe in us; we cannot make them materialists and sceptics.” ~ 31

“Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, he relies on the troughs even more than the peaks; some of his special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.” ~ 38

“One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with loathsome little replicas of Himself.” ~ 38-39

“We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; he is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.” ~ 39

“In the first place I have always found that the trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex.” ~ 43

“The attack has a much better chance of success when the man’s whole inner world is drab and cold and empty.” ~ 43

“Talk to him about ‘moderation’ in all things. If you can get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point’, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all – and more amusing.” ~ 46

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary.” ~ 50

“…I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents.” ~ 51

“Humour for them is the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame.” ~ 55

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” ~ 60-61

“Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When he talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.” ~ 65

“Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.” ~ 67

“Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? … 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.” ~ 69

“Let him not think of it as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character.” ~ 70

“The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents – or in a sunrise, or an elephant, or a waterfall.” ~ 71

“For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with his right hand what He has taken away with his left.” ~ 72

“It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities.” ~ 76

“The real fun is working up hatred between those who say ‘mass’ and those who say ‘holy communion’ when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’ in any form which would hold water for five minutes.” ~ 84

“Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.” ~ 88

“If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.” ~ 88

“Males are best turned to gluttons with the help of their vanity. They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where the steaks are really ‘properly’ cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit.” ~ 89-90

“The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy.” ~ 93

“We have [used] the poets and novelists [to] persuad[e] the humans that a curious, and usually short lived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding.” ~ 93

“The truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relationship is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.” ~ 96

“Leave it to them to discuss whether ‘Love’ or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars, or teetotalism, or education, are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Can’t you see there’s no answer? ~ 98

“For as things are, your man has now discovered the dangerous truth that these attacks don’t last forever; consequently you cannot use again what is, after all, our best weapon – the belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of us except by yielding.” ~ 105

“Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children.” ~ 107

“Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being ‘frank’ and ‘healthy’ and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist – making he role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.” ~ 107

“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And he sense of injury depends on the feelings that a legitimate claim has been denied.” ~ 111

“Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.” ~ 118-119

“A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, and inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport in hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee.” ~ 123

“Yes; courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity.” ~ 141

“A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others.” ~ 142

“[The humans], of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so.” ~ 154

“Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels.” ~ 160

“But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful – horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.” ~ 160

“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. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.” ~ 162

“He knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.” ~ 162

“At any rate, you will soon find that the justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.” ~ 165

“Make full use of the fact that up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less.” ~ 167

“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: ‘Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!’ Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, ‘Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite’.” ~ 200