“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future.He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love-a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own.” He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. “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.“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”.“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”.Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.” We are empty and would be filled He is full and flows over. “We want cattle who can finally become food He wants servants who can finally become sons.“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.”.“All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.”.The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” “The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know.He wants men to be concerned with what they do our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy.“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.”.“They constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.”.Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things.”

“Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.If you aren’t aware of that when you look at these quotes, you’ll be terribly confused! Oftentimes the “they” or “them” in these quotes refers to humans in general. Note that these quotes are from one devil (or demon) to another. But I’ll try to limit myself here to 10-15. It should be (and often is) considered required reading for any Christian. For me, this is where Lewis’s understanding of indwelling sin and the potential workings of evil come beautifully to the fore. Many pastors and theologians had recommended Lewis’s Screwtape Letters to me before I got around to reading it.

Cs lewis letters from the devil