Frases de Clive Staples Lewis

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“El dolor, la injusticia y el error son tres tipos de males con una curiosa diferencia: la injusticia y el error pueden ser ignorados por el que vive dentro de ellos, mientras que el dolor, en cambio, no puede ser ignorado, es un mal desenmascarado, inequívoco: toda persona sabe que algo anda mal cuando ella sufre. Y es que Dios nos habla por medio de la conciencia, y nos grita por medio de nuestros dolores.”

“Cuando hayas alcanzado tu propia habitación, sé amable con los que han escogido puertas distintas y con aquéllos que aún están en el pasillo. Si están equivocados, necesitan tus oraciones; y si son tus enemigos, estás bajo órdenes para rezar por ellos. Es una de las normas comunes a toda la casa.”

“Mi argumento en contra de Dios fue que el universo parecía ser muy cruel e injusto. ¿Pero cómo conseguí esa idea de justo e injusto? Un hombre no puede llamar una línea torcida a menos que no tenga alguna idea de una línea recta.¿Con qué estaba comparando este universo cuando lo llamaba injusto?”

“Si te estás acercando a Él no como la meta sino como un camino, no como el fin sino como un medio, en realidad no te estás acercando a Él en absoluto.”

“¿Con que estoy comparando este universo cuando lo llamo injusto?”

“Mi argumento contra Dios era que el universo parecia tan cruel e injusto”

“Tú averiguarás más de Dios por la ley moral del universo en general”

“Usted puede encerrarle por loco, puede escupirle y darle muerte como si fuera un demonio; o puede postrarse a sus pies y llamarle Señor y Dios. Pero no nos presentamos con la necedad de una arrogante condescendencia acerca de que él es un gran maestro humano. El no nos ha dejado abierta esa posibilidad. Ni siquiera lo intentó.”

“Los cristianos que más hicieron por el mundo presente fueron precisamente aquellos que pensaron más en el venidero. Fue a partir de que los cristianos comenzaron a pensar menos en el otro mundo que se hicieron más ineficaces en éste. Apunta al cielo y también le darás a la tierra; apunta a la tierra y no le darás a ninguno.”

“Los críticos que tratan lo adulto como un término de aprobación, en lugar de como un término meramente descriptivo, no pueden ser adultos en sí mismos. Estar preocupado por ser adulto, admirar la madurez porque es madurez, sonrojarse ante la sospecha de ser infantil; esas cosas son las señas de la niñez y de la adolescencia. Y en la niñez y en la adolescencia son, en moderación, síntomas saludables. Las cosas jóvenes deberían querer crecer. Pero para continuar hacia la mitad de la vida o incluso a la edad adulta temprana esta preocupación sobre ser adulto es una marca de un desarrollo realmente detenido. Cuando tenía diez años, leía cuentos de hadas en secreto y me habría avergonzado si me hubieran encontrado haciendo eso. Ahora que tengo cincuenta las leo abiertamente. Cuando fui un hombre dejé atrás las cosas infantiles, incluyendo el miedo a la puerilidad y el deseo de ser más mayor.”

“Ahora, hoy, este momento, es nuestra oportunidad de elegir el lado correcto.”

“Al afecto se debe el noventa por ciento de toda felicidad sólida y duradera.”

“La humildad perfecta prescinde de la modestia.”

“Creo en el cristianismo como creo que el Sol ha salido. No sólo porque lo vea sino porque gracias a eso puedo ver todo lo demás.”

“Todavía hay esperanza, cuando nos enfrentamos sin prejuicios a un problema sin solucionar. Sin embargo, no hay esperanza si actuamos como si el problema no existiese.”

“Aquí es donde los sueños, sueños, entiendes, cobran vida, se hacen realidad. No ensoñaciónes: sueños.”

“Me volví mía solo cuando me entregué a Otro.”

“¿Quién eres tú? Nadie. Quien es Gachas? LA PERSONA MÁS IMPORTANTE QUE HAY.”

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”

“Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. … give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man:”

“The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

“Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule to you tell a copy from an original?”

“Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.”

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

“Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!”

“You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream.”

“Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.”

“They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

“The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.”

“Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died.”

“It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed — not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the fold of the Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!”

“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

“The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.”

“But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.”

“When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.”

“The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.”

“Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.”

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

“I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend’s offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.”

“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”

“Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist…”

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”