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.”

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

“He came in sight of a pass guarded by armed men. ‘you cannot pass … Do you not know that all this country belongs to the Spirit of the Age? … Here Enlightenment, take this fugitive to our Master.”

“Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

“A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.”

“You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—”Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.””

“If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.”

“When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”

“Savage – There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.”

“The wraith of Sigmund said. “You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.””

“He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.”

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

“I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is — what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course…”

“Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin: ‘Our relations with the cow are not delicate-as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.’ … John said, ‘Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.’ ‘And pray, what difference is there except by custom?’ ‘Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?”

“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only—and that is to support the ultimate career.”

“The devil…the prowde spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.”

“It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”

“Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.”

“There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”

“I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”

“God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.”

“Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal…. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

“The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”

“The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.”

“This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.”