Top 40 Josef Pieper Quotes (2025 Update)

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. “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

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

— Josef Pieper

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Josef Pieper

10. “The “supreme good” and its attainment – that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.”

— Josef Pieper

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Josef Pieper

17. “Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.”

— Josef Pieper

18. “Surrender to sensuality paralyzes the powers of the moral person.”

— Josef Pieper

19. “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

20. “To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.”

— Josef Pieper

21. “The soul of leisure, it can be said, lies in “celebration”. Celebration is the point at which the three elements of leisure come to a focus: relaxation, effortlessness, and superiority of “active leisure” to all functions.”

— Josef Pieper

22. “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

23. “Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end, even though that end be “the salvation of Western civilization”. Celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake. That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure.”

— Josef Pieper

24. “Properly speaking, the liberal arts receive an honorarium, while servile work receives a wage.”

— Josef Pieper

25. “Wonder does not make one industrious, for to feel astonished is to be disturbed.”

— Josef Pieper

26. “Aristotle says of leisure, “A man will live thus, not to the extent that he is a man, but to the extent that a divine principle dwells within him.”16.”

— Josef Pieper

27. “Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.”

— Josef Pieper

28. “Separated from the sphere of divine worship, of the cult of the divine, and from the power it radiates, leisure is as impossible as the celebration of a feast. Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.”

— Josef Pieper

29. “The contemplation of revealed truth is a disturbing element in Christian philosophy though a very beautiful one, for it means that the framework of philosophy is widened, and, above all, it can never rest satisfied with the flat, one-dimensional “harmonies” of rationalism. That is the moment when a Christian philosophy, striking upon the rock of divine truth, foams and boils; and that is its unique privilege.”

— Josef Pieper

30. “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

31. “Leisure draws its vitality from affirmation. It is not the same as non-activity, nor is it identical with tranquility; it is not even the same as inward tranquility. Rather, it is like the tranquil silence of lovers, which draws its strength from concord.”

— Josef Pieper

32. “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

33. “Even the unhappy lover is happier than the nonlover, with whom the lover would never change places. In the fact of loving he has already partaken of something beloved.”

— Josef Pieper

34. “Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. “Temple” means... that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation... Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.”

— Josef Pieper

35. “The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost.”

— Josef Pieper

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

— Josef Pieper

37. “Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralized with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes.”

— Josef Pieper

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

— Josef Pieper

39. “No, the contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one’s living; it is man’s happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God – which is to say love. Love that certainly brings a particular freshness and readiness to work along with it, but that no one with the least experience could conceivably confuse with the tense activity of the fanatical “worker”.”

— Josef Pieper

40. “To be fettered to work means to be bound to this vast utilitarian process in which our needs are satisfied, and, what is more, tied to such an extent that the life of the working man is wholly consumed in it.”

— Josef Pieper

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

— Josef Pieper