Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

Screwtape: "No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will...active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more 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."

Screwtape: "You should always try to make the patient abandon the food or books he really likes in favor of the 'best' people, the 'right' food, the 'important' books."

"The safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

Screwtape: "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...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."

"The prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best."

Screwtape: "The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."

Screwtape: "All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect, or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there."

That is a trap our entire culture has fallen into. A love of humanity, and a hatred for our neighbors. We can sacrifice for someone we can't see, but heaven forbid that we help the person standing right next to us.

Screwtape: "the great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors 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."