Explore Quotes on Screwtape Letters

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

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

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

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary

Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand.

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.

It is always the novice who exaggerates.

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

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

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

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.

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.

Suspicion often creates what it suspects.

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

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden.

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.

When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.