C. S. Lewis

Quotes

1. But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. The mere word phase will very likely do the trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of them before—they all have—and that he always feels superior and patronising to the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them but simply because they are in the past.

   p. 61

2. 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. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

   p. 90

3. The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather.

4. Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. . . . As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

5. 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.

6. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

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

8. Feed him on minor poets and fifthrate novelists until you have made him believe that “Love” is irresistible. . . . There must be several young women who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them.

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

10. There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

11. Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us — to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.

12. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.