The Screwtape Letters is a Christian apologetic novel by C. S. Lewis and dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien. It is written in a satirical, epistolary style and while it is fictional in format, the plot and characters are used to address Christian theological issues, primarily those to do with temptation and resistance to it. Profoundly inspirational Screwtape Letters quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
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Famous Screwtape Letters Quotes
Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape. C. S. Lewis
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others you can tell the others by their hunted expression. C.S. Lewis
Above all, do not attempt to use science I mean, the real sciences as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. 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
A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all and more amusing. C. S. Lewis
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. C.S. Lewis
Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that suits him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. 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
The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighborhood of the Holy. C. S. Lewis
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. 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
We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self importance, and resentment. C. S. Lewis
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. C.S. Lewis
Devils are depicted with bats wings and good angels with birds wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. C. S. Lewis
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. C.S. Lewis
Provided that any of those neighbors 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
Suspicion often creates what it suspects. C.S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians half spirit and half animal as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. C. S. Lewis
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. C.S. Lewis
He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. C. S. Lewis
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. 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
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. C.S. Lewis
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others you can tell the others by their hunted expression. C. S. Lewis
Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. 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
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. C. S. Lewis
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. C.S. Lewis
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. C. S. Lewis
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. C.S. Lewis
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians half spirit and half animal as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. C.S. Lewis
He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand. C. S. Lewis
A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all and more amusing. C.S. Lewis
When two humans have lived together for many years, it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. C. S. Lewis
A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish. C.S. Lewis
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. 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
If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt. C. S. Lewis
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. C.S. Lewis
You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair hardly felt as pain of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. C. S. Lewis
When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this easily managed. C.S. Lewis
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. C. S. Lewis
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
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. C. S. Lewis
Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. C.S. Lewis
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
