Sage Words From The Screwtape Letters

Here's C.S. Lewis on humility, from "The Screwtape Letters" (a book composed of fictional letters from a demon to one of his apprentices, advising how to keep a Christian from living out his calling):

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfullness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be ...
The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.

How about those apples?