The Screwtape Letters

by C.S. Lewis

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

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.

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.

Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda.

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it”, while really it is finding its place in him.

Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon—are always blowing our whole structure away.

How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allows us so little of it.

The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth.

It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as th...

In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them.

Bring us back food, or be food yourself.

The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute exhaustion.

Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury.

“Real” means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had.

The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting “to eat the cake and have it”; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it.

You have let a soul slip through your fingers. The howl of sharpened famine for that loss re-echoes at this moment through all the levels of the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself. It makes me mad to think of it. How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you! There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognised the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure—stretching their eased limbs. What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing?

Recognition made him free of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet. Only you were left outside.

The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

For suspicion often creates what it suspects.

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany.

The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar.