C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)

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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.

C. S. Lewis
I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.

C. S. Lewis
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!

C. S. Lewis
The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

C. S. Lewis
What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.

C. S. Lewis
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
There are two kinds of people in the world; those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'Go ahead, then, have it your way.'

C. S. Lewis
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather [for the Devil].

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

C. S. Lewis
The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

C. S. Lewis
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 evil's whole structure away.

C. S. Lewis
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.

C. S. Lewis
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.

C. S. Lewis
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

C. S. Lewis
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

C. S. Lewis
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.

C. S. Lewis
He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

C. S. Lewis
The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

C. S. Lewis
My dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.

C. S. Lewis
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

C. S. Lewis
Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it 'for a reasonable period'—and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis