I am reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and thought I would throw some quotes out there. The premise of the book is that it is a collection of letters from a senior demon (Screwtape) to his nephew, Wormwood advising him on how best to tempt humans away from God.

 

"It increases the patient’s (human) reluctance to thing about the enemy (God). All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased ten-fold. They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in fincancial embarrassment hate the sight of a pass-book."

 

"Habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to pleasure)."

 

"Nothing – is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and in kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that hedoes not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

 

"It does not matter how small the sins are provided that there cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts…"