Josef Pieper famous quotes

... 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

#Soul #Empty #Contemplation

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

#Knowing #Intuition #Would Be

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

#Mean #Happy Life #Intuition

If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good -- which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward -- this man, and he alone, is truly brave.
-- Josef Pieper

#Fall #Taken #Ambition

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

#Felicity

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

#Mean #Psychics #Joy

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

#Mean #Self #Trying

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

#Hard Work #Men #Toil

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.
-- Josef Pieper

#Mad #Intuition #Leisure

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

#Men #Order #Giving

Only those are called liberal or free which are concerned with knowledge; those which are concerned with utilitarian ends... are called servile...The question is... can man develop to the full as a functionary and a worker and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence? Stated differently and translated back into our terms: is there such a thing as a liberal art?
-- Josef Pieper

#Art #Men #Ends

Being precedes Truth, and … Truth precedes the Good.
-- Josef Pieper

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

#Religious #Teaching #Littles

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

#Christian #Eye #Reality

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.
-- Josef Pieper

#Art #Silence #Culture

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

#Men #Justice #Habit

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

#Mean #Special #World

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

#Special #Purpose #Elements

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

#Life Is #Contemplation #Active

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

#Men #Needs #May

Surrender to sensuality paralyzes the powers of the moral person.
-- Josef Pieper

#Moral #Surrender #Abstinence

Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.
-- Josef Pieper

#Faith #Inspiration #Silent

To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.
-- Josef Pieper

#Gratitude #Grateful #Conscious

Contemplation does not ignore the 'historical Gethsemane', does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.
-- Josef Pieper

#Evil #Historical #Sorrow

If God really became incarnate, and if His Incarnation can with justice compel man to change his life,then we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time. ... What happens in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist is something for which all religions of mankind have exressed longing, dimly sensed was coming, and as a rule even prefigured- the physical presence of the divine Logos made man, and the presence of his sacrificial death, in the midst of the congregation celebrating the mysteries.
-- Josef Pieper

#Men #Justice #Alternatives

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

#Gratitude #Feelings #Pay

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

#Steps #Eternity #Smallest

The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine.
-- Josef Pieper

#Philosophy #Desire #Delight

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

#Men #Wrath #Evil

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

#Exclusion #World #Demand

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

#Essence #May #Leisure

Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.
-- Josef Pieper

#Self #Opposites #Together

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

#Perfect #Doe #Way

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

#Desire #Wonder #Longing