“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
Letter X
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
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Clive Staples Lewis 272
Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist 1898–1963Related quotes
“The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.”
Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (6 April 1903)
“This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.”
“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
“All the Good of mortals is mortal.”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XCVIII: On the Fickleness of Fortune
“With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.”
Variant: The simplest explanation is usually the right one
“All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”
Love and Death (1975)
Context: If I don't kill him he'll make war all through Europe. But murder... the most foul of all crimes. What would Socrates say? All those Greeks were homosexuals. Boy, they must have had some wild parties. I bet they all took a house together in Crete for the summer. A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. Heh... I'm not a homosexual. Once, some cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions. You know, some men are heterosexual and some men are bisexual and some men don't think about sex at all, you know... they become lawyers.
Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 92, “The Music that Plays” (p. 716)