Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: The Screwtape Letters

How much better for (the cause of hell) if all humans died... amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick an his true condition! And how disastrous for (hell) is the continual rememberance of death which war enforces.
-CSL

(Hell) want(s) cattle who can finally become food; (Christ) wants servants who can finally become sons.
-CSL

You must have often wondered why (Christ) does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistable and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.
-CSL

(Hell's) cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do (God'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.
-CSL

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

...active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
-CSL

...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. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong-- certainly not to them, whatever happens.
-CSL

The World and the Flesh have failed us; a third power remains.
-CSL

As a result, while their minds are buzzing in the vacuum, (hell) ha(s) the vetter chance to slip in and bend them to the action (it) has decided on... (Hell) has trained (us) to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain-- not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
-CSL

This, indeed, is probably one of (God's) motives for creating a dangerous world-- a world in which moral issues really come to the point. 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. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
-CSL