Browsing Quotes With Tag: screwtape-letters (26)
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Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant.’ We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land which favored heroes attain – not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:41 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy, not to inform men, but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:40 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 rejected at the pleasure of Another!
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Men are not angered my mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it [love] is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is the least natural, least redolent of its maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula… To get the man’s soul and five him nothing in return – that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:34 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:28 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
In civilized life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face.
...Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention… once this habit is well-established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offense is taken.Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones… You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who had been enchanted in the nursery by “stories from the Odyssey” buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing… and their lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore harder to tempt.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!