Screwtape Letters Quotes

“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.”
― C. S. Lewis, The screwtape Letters

“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. Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle. (...) There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly as we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in any case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twichings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition form below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible. Everything is different when you approach a Transposition from above.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“I think that real landscapes enter into pictures, not that pictures will one day sprout out into real trees and grass”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft under foot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“That infant's short life glorified you. And because of this fact, we can be quite confident that he sits at your right hand. And he may be counted with the Angels, and on the day of judgement it will be him, the immaculate, judging me, the sinner. We can be confident, but can we be sure?”
― George Fisher

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
― C. S. Lewis, The screwtape letters

“Em síntese, Deus se compraz em pedir ao homem sua individualidade, mas tão logo o homem a cede, o maior prazer de Deus é devolvê-la aprimorada”
― C. S. Lewis

“Há dois erros iguais e opostos no que diz respeito aos demônios: uma é desacreditar em sua existência. A outra é acreditar e sentir um excessivo e doentio interesse neles”
― C. S. Lewis

“The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
― CS Lewis

“She's the word of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The names of my devils have excited a good deal of curiosity, and there have been many explanations, all wrong. The truth is that I aimed merely at making them nasty—and here too I am perhaps indebted to Lindsay—by the sound. Once a name was invented, I might speculate like anyone else (and with no more authority than anyone else) as to the phonetic associations which caused the unpleasant effect. I fancy that Scrooge, screw, thumbscrew, tapeworm, and red tape all do some work in my hero’s name, and that slob, slobber, slubber, and gob have all gone into slubgob.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters