Vanity

The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, to not care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks.
- C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

The Draw of the Real, the Live, the Unfabricated

...my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside.  For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested.  I should have hopes of that boy.  Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books.  The organs of appreciation exist in them.  They are not impotent.  And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

The child whose love is here, at least doth reap

One precious gain, that he forgets himself. 

C.S. Lewis (Lillie's that Fester; from The World's Last Night: and Other Essays) 

And What if the Bible is Silent On the Matter?

What I want to say and show, if I may, is, that a man will please God better by believing some things that are not told him, than by confining his faith to those things that are expressly said--said to arouse in us the truth-seeing faculty, the spiritual desire, the prayer for the good things which God will give to them that ask him.

"But is not this dangerous doctrine? Will not a man be taught thus to
believe the things he likes best, even to pray for that which he likes
best? And will he not grow arrogant in his confidence?"

If it be true that the Spirit strives with our spirit; if it be true that God teaches men, we may safely leave those dreaded results to him. If the man is of the Lord's company, he is safer with Him than with those who would secure their safety by hanging on the outskirts and daring nothing. If he is not taught of God in that which he hopes for, God will let him know it. He will receive, something else than he prays for. If he can pray to God for anything not good, the answer will come in the flames of that consuming fire. These will soon bring him to some of his spiritual senses. But it will be far better for him to be thus sharply tutored, than to go on a snail's pace in the journey of the spiritual life. And for arrogance, I have seen nothing breed it faster or in more offensive forms than the worship of the letter.

- George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons First Series: The Higher Faith))