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.”

“He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.”

“The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”

“I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?”

“Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”

“Who believes in Aslan nowadays?”

“Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. “it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I – I – I.”

“I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.”

“The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…”

“This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again…. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

“If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.”

“"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery."”

“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.”

“My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.”

“I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.”

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

“100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.”

“Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.”

“Are the gods not just?'
'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”

“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”

“What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H. C. F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”

“If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”

“Our father was married twice,' continued Humanist. 'Once to a lady named Epichaerecacia, and afterwards to Euphuia…”

“Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?”

“Not my idea of God, but God.”

“When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other — the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow — is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.”