The Screwtape Letters

by C.S. Lewis

If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.

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.

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.

A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.

If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know,

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

The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.

we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist—making