"Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation."

"And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else -happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness."

"The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence."

"In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act."

"Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you'll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped."

"I shouldn't need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn't think to stop it?"

"The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag."

"With addiction, a client's fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana -the fear of Fear itself."

"There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates."

"Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don't feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they're stuck right where they started: Guilty."

"If God's suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat's sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good."

"As a motivation -for humans, but Christians especially- guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that."

"Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it."

"This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased."

"Teach them the shame that tells the lie, 'I am unforgivable, when the truth is, 'I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control. Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage."

"The Americans' great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls."

"Faith is where they learn about their God, but Prayer is where they explore Him."

"If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they're always either standing next to a hole or down in it."

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes."

"When everything all in a moment comes together, surprisingly perfect, it doesn't prove there's a loving God; but if there is, isn't it perfect when all in a moment, God proves how surprisingly He loves?"

"Everyone needs to calm down! Okay, you got a weird cookie. So what? I don't mean to swat your ego here, buddy, but this smacks a little narcissistic for me. God is not trying to communicate to you through a cookie. It doesn't work that way. God's not all Jack-and-the-magic-beans and tooth-beneath-the pillow voodoo. You don't just close your eyes, flap open your Bible, and slam a steak knife into a verse. It's that sort of thinking that leads to witch trials and Senate probes."

"They prefer a God of an altogether softer flavor. Nothing too extreme. Complaisance, not magnanimity. They do not think upon the 'God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God. They prefer to think in terms of 'God liking them. That's the God they've conjured for themselves."

"That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary's greatest curatives -gratitude."

"And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they've lost, forever."

"When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone."

"We've spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that's precisely how we did it -by making it lower case."

"When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such burgeoning of possibility causes even their Memory to be lightened and redeemed. The scales fall from their eyes and they wait on their Father with the same childlike wonder that watches a sunrise to see what might happen this time."

"They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves."

"If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He's going to ask you what you bought."

"At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason to think any statement made by some part concerning the whole has any validity. Mind was caused by the material universe, if mind is right. But only the greater can accurately define the lesser, never the other way round, so if mind is right, mind would never know."

"They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself."

"So in a man's mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don't trust things you can manage, you manage them. And so, God as information is managed and no relationship of trust is fostered."

"Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too."

"In Joy, to lose one's life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other."

"Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten."

"Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble."

"They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they're quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But you'll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word 'pursuit. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don't do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There's too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!"

"If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain."

"Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional -the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations."

"Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment."

"Remember, this type doesn't really believe He'll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay."

"Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased -facts the new trues."

"It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn't mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude."

"An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we've already got them in Hell."

"When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations."

"With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook -that prissy little virtue, Temperance- for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended."

"It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise."

"Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it's just better form."

"As a rule, Americans are big on that word 'choice and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose."

"Trust is crazy. You are a risky, risky, God. I didn't sign up to be Amazing Trust Boy, and I did not sign up for Danger God. You're flatly not safe."