C.S. Lewis

From C.S. Lewis’ The Scretape Letters:

“The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.”

-Demon “Screwtape” to his understudy “Wormwood”

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

C.S. Lewis

“The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism–He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact, just as one if stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.”

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

Here are two memorable quotations from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters:

• 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.

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