I have found for thirty years that preaching and teaching about God's demand that we delight in him more than anything else breaks and humbles people, and makes them desperate for true conversion and true Christianity. Oh, how easy it is to think we are what we ought to be when the emotions are made peripheral. Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions--they are the weathercock of the heart. Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 31

In Rhetoric imagination is present for the sake of passion (and, therefore, in the long run, for the sake of action), while in poetry passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health--the rightness and richness of a man's total response to the world. Such rightness, of course, has a tendency to contribute indirectly to right action, besides being in itself exhilarating and tranquillizing; that is why the old critics were right enough when they said that Poetry taught by delighting, or delighted by teaching. . . . Poetry certainly aims at making the reader's mind what it was not before. The idea of a poetry which exists only for the poet -- a poetry which the public rather overhears than hears--is a foolish novelty . . . There is nothing specially admirable in talking to oneself. Indeed, it is arguable that Himself is the very audience before whom a man postures most and on whom he practices the most elaborate deceptions.

C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 54

 “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.” 

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

How easy it is to think we are what we ought to be when the emotions are made peripheral. Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions--they are the weathercock of the heart.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God