Geoffrey Wood Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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.

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.

Make good and sure your clients all call themselves Americans - proudly so, defiantly, loudly - but without any more thought about it than wearing a hat.

Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy.

But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you’ll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There’s more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up.

And I’m glad to see that all three clients are male. Not that the females can’t be corrupted, I’ve just always found the males more amenable to temptation. The males have always had all the power, so that does much to explain it. As they say: Easy pickings.

First of all, don’t ever let them try to define that word “happiness” for themselves. They can’t and that’s precisely what we never want them to realize. Keep it a vague bright mist hovering about their heads. Locate it securely at the end of implausible rainbows. Hide it snugly in some corner of their thoughts they rarely visit.

Why not have a God in your back pocket for when you need Him? That’s all most of them mean by 'Christian.

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

Most of them don’t mind too much the idea of a God existing somewhere, just so long as He’s indulgent.

They really do occupy a scrumptious little dark corner of my heart!

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.

Remember, philosophically speaking, Americans are mongrels - practical materialists but with a dreamy streak of divine approval.

But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.

I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.

No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.

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.