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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

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Josef Pieper
Age: 93 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 4
Died: 1997
Died: November 6
Philosopher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Silence
Regain
Ability
Amusement
Culture
Substitute
Art
Substitutes
True
Leisure
Insight
Destroy
Amusements
Unless
Hectic

More quotes by Josef Pieper

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...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
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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
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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
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The supreme good and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.
Josef Pieper
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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
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...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
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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
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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
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Happiness is essentially a gift we are not the forgers of our own felicity.
Josef Pieper
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Happiness,... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity.
Josef Pieper
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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
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Justice is a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will.
Josef Pieper
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good.
Josef Pieper
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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
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... 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