Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

"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."

"In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but NOT sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness."

Oof. This one is rampant in our society.

"The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth....We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a 'normal life' is the exception. Apparently He wants some-but only a very few-of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years."

"So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or 'science' or psychology, or what not."

"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."

"It is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and...hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it-all this [wears] out a soul by attrition."

"Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another."

"To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded."

Wow, this has become even truer. How many times have you heard an author completely dismissed because they are an old dead white man?

"Anything, even a sin, which has the effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run."

"When...distraction crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavors, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm."