Quotes from Josef Pieper

Our effort has been to regain some space for true leisure, to bring back a fundamentally right possession of leisure, "active leisure".

There is no need to waste words showing that not everything is useless which cannot be brought under the definition of the useful.

But the man who by such devices is the more imprisoned within a workaday world now made amusing no longer misses real festivity; he does not notice the emptiness. And thus he even stops grieving over his loss – and the loss thereby is finally sealed.

The effort of human thought has not been able to track down the essence of a single gnat.

There is an entry in Baudelaire's Journal Intime that is fearful in the precision of its cynicism: "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.

Only when love is directed toward the infinite divine appeasement which courses through all reality from the ultimate ground of reality; and when the beloved object shows itself to the soul's gaze in a wholly immediate, effortless, utterly tranquil (yet inwardly troubled) self-revelation, even though for no longer than the duration of a lightning flash - only then do we have contemplation in the full meaning of the word.

Can a lie be taken as communication? I tend to deny it. A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other's share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality.

Worship is either something "given", divine worship is fore-ordained—or it does not exist at all.

The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves; the servile arts are those which have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.

A functionary is trained. Training is defined as being concerned with some one side or aspect of man, with regard to some special subject. Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. Education concerns the whole man, man capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things.

a consistently planned "worker" State there is no room for philosophy because philosophy cannot serve other ends than its own or it ceases to be philosophy; nor can the sciences be carried on in a philosophical manner, which means to say that there can be no such thing as university (academic) education in the full sense of the word.

I have never bothered or asked", Goethe said to Friedrich Soret in 1830, "in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."35

We have let an empty future that we propose to make by our own standards become the ideal over and against a real past that revealed to us what man really was and is: namely, a being open to wonder who did not create himsel for the world in which he dwells.

There is no doubt of one thing: the world of the "worker" is taking shape with dynamic force—with such a velocity that, rightly or wrongly, one is tempted to speak of demonic force in history.

Man is not happy by virtue of his being. Rather, his whole existence is determined precisely by the non possession of ultimate gratification.

He who knows does not feel wonder. It could not be said that God experiences wonder, for God knows in the most absolute and perfect way.

The eye of perfected friendship with God is aware of deeper dimensions of reality, to which the eyes of the average man and the average Christian are not yet opened.

Happiness is essentially a gift; we are not the forgers of our own felicity.

Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.

Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know.

Happiness,... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity.

Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.

The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is "in him"; nothing can happen to him. The same may also be said for the contemplative person; he needs himself alone; he lacks nothing.

What distinguishes - in both senses of that word - contemplation is rather this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. "Without love there would be no contemplation." Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object.