Quotes

[Pattertwigs Pal]

Are there any quotes you find memorable in The Screwtape Letters? If there are, here's the place to post them. It would be nice if you identify the quote by letter but that isn't required.

[Meltintalle]

Letter 8

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.

[daughter of the King]

Letter V

Of course, at the precise moment of terror, bereavement, or physical pain, you may catch your man when his reason is temporarily suspended. But even then, if he applies to Enemy headquarters, I have found that the post is nearly always defended.

[stargazer]

Letter 4, discussing prayer:

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.

And

The simplest way is to turn their gaze away from Him [the devils' Enemy] towards themselves.

[Fire Fairy]

Letter 8:

He wants them 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.

[stargazer]

Letter 8

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, but still obeys.

[ValiantArcher]

Letter 6

The results of such fanciful hatred are often most disappointing, and of all humans the English are in this respect the most deplorable milksops. They are creatures of the miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.

[Movie Aristotle]

Letter 7:

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.

[ValiantArcher]

Letter 29

He sees as well as you do that 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.

A familiar quote to many I'm sure, but it's an excellent one.

[stargazer]

Letter 14

The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

Letter 21

And all the time the joke is that the word 'Mine' in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say 'Mine' of each thing that exists, and specially of each man...At present the Enemy says 'Mine' of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it; Our Father hopes in the end to say 'Mine' of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest.

[Melian_Maia]

Letter 8

He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best.

[narnianerd]

When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.

[Ithilwen]

I think one of my favorite quotes from the book ever is:

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.

~Riella

[Melian_Maia]

Three of my favorite quotes from various places in the book. I don't have exact references, sorry, they're taken from my little notebook of favorite quotes.

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

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.

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them for eternity.

[Ithilwen]

...almost anything he wants to 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.

~Riella

[wolfloversk]

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

That one is so very true... You can practically watch it in some people.

My dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.