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The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis

Top 10 Best Quotes

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

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

“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

“Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."[From the Preface]”

“When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”

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Book Keywords:

humor, reality-human-nature-temptation, administration, management, eternity, women, evil, hell, past, time, gratitude, efficiency, corporations, deeds, zealousness, future, feeling, dictatorship, present, fear, corporatocracy, incrementalism, heart, action, bureaucracy, compromise, love, courage, police-state, big-business

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