Josef Pieper Quotes

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture and ourselves.

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.

Modern religious teaching have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.

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.

To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.

Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good.

All just order in the world is based on this, that man give man what is his due.

[T]o know means to reach the reality of existing things[.]

The "supreme good" and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.

The ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.

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.

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.

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

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

The essence of leisure is not to assure that we may function smoothly but rather to assure that we, embedded in our social function, are enabled to remain fully human.

Justice is a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will.

The brave man uses wrath for his own act, above all in attack, 'for it is peculiar to wrath to pounce upon evil. Thus fortitude and wrath work directly upon each other.

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

To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.

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