The Weight of Glory - by C. S. Lewis

"Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object." (pg. 29)

"To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son - it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain.  But so it is." (pg. 39)

"We can be left utterly and absolutely outside - repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored.  On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.  We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities." (pg. 41ff)

"The main difference between Reason and Conscience is an alarming one.  It is thus: that while the unarguable intuitions on which all depend are liable to be corrupted by passion when we are considering truth and falsehood, they are much more liable, they are almost certain to be corrupted when we are considering good and evil." (pg. 68)

"The attempt to discover by introspective analysis our own spiritual condition is to me a horrible thing which reveals, at best, not the secrets of God's spirit and ours, but their transpositions in intellect, emotion, and imagination, and which at worst may be the quickest road to presumption or despair." (pg. 106ff)

"As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.  The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility." (pg. 114)

"Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." (pg. 154)

"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship." (pg. 160)

"There is, in fact, a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve." (pg. 162)

"The Christian is called not to individualism but to membership in the mystical body.  A consideration of the differences between the secular collective and the mystical body is therefore the first step to understanding how Christianity without being individualistic can yet counteract collectivism." (pg. 163)

"Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality." (pg. 167)

"Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live." (pg. 170)

"Neither the individual nor the community as popular thought understands them can inherit eternal life, neither the natural self, nor the collective mass, but a new creature." (pg. 176)

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York, NY:HarperCollins, 2001)