Josef Pieper Quotes

#1. 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.

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

#5. To be just meaans to recognize the other as other; it means to give acknowledgment even where one cannot love ... A just man is just, therefore, because he sanctions another person in his very separateness and helps him to receive his due.

Josef Pieper

#6. Wonder does not make one industrious, for to feel astonished is to be disturbed.

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

#8. Surrender to sensuality paralyzes the powers of the moral person.

Josef Pieper

#9. The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love. Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation.

Josef Pieper

#10. 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.

Josef Pieper

#11. A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

#14. 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.

Josef Pieper

#15. Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal.

Josef Pieper

#16. 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.

Josef Pieper

#17. Finally, it is no longer completely fantastic to think that a day may come when not the executioners alone will deny the inalienable rights of men, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice.

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

#21. The common element in all the special forms of contemplation is the loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God Himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all that happens in the world.

Josef Pieper

#22. 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.

Josef Pieper

#23. The restoration of man's inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age - unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one's realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.

Josef Pieper

#24. Of course the world of work begins to become - threatens to become - our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.

Josef Pieper

#25. No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.

Josef Pieper

#26. Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good; and only from this stout-hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished.

Josef Pieper

#27. It is possible to pray in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world ... then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it.

Josef Pieper

#28. The really human thing is to see the stars above the roof, to preserve our apprehension of the universality of things in the midst of the habits of daily life, and to see "the world" above and beyond our immediate environment.

Josef Pieper

#29. The intemperately wrathful man is less obnoxious than the intemperately lustful one, while the immoderate pleasure-seeker, intent on dissimulation and camouflage, is unable to give or take a straight look in the eye.

Josef Pieper

#30. Perhaps when all the consequences of a false presupposition suddenly becomes a direct threat mean in their great terror will become aware that it is no longer possible to call back to true and effective life a truth they have allowed to become remote
just for the sake of their bare survival.

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

#32. 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.

Josef Pieper

#33. 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.

Josef Pieper

#34. 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.

Josef Pieper

#35. The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refused to have anything as a gift.

Josef Pieper

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

Josef Pieper

#37. 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.

Josef Pieper

#38. Happiness and joy are not the same. For what does the fervent craving for joy mean? It does not mean that we wish at any cost to experience the psychic state of being joyful. We want to have reason for joy, for an unceasing joy that fills us utterly, sweeps all before it, exceeds all measure.

Josef Pieper

#39. If to know is to work, then knowledge is the fruit of our own unaided effort and activity; then knowledge includes nothing which is not due to the effort of man, and there is nothing gratuitous about it, nothing "inspired", nothing "given" about it.

Josef Pieper