Joseph Pieper Quotes
Joseph Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and one of the most widely read twentieth-century interpreters of Thomas Aquinas. Long-time professor at Munster, he combined careful scholarship in medieval philosophy with a gift for short, pellucid books that brought the central themes of the perennial Christian philosophical tradition to a wide modern readership. The quotes below are attributed to Joseph Pieper, organized by topic.
Browse Joseph Pieper by topic
Joseph Pieper on Death
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“Leisure lives on affirmation. It […] includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation. The highest form of affirmation is the festival; and according to Karl Kerenyi , the historian of religion, to festival belong "peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once." The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning”
The Kerenyi quote is from Karl Kerenyi, Die antike Religion (Amsterdam, 1940), p. 66.
Joseph Pieper on Freedom
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“[...] a genuine awareness of tradition makes us free and independent from the conservatism of those who claim to be its guardians.”
Wikiquote
Joseph Pieper on God
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Worship is the source of culture, not its product.”
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“Since "the answers of the special sciences" do not reach "the horizon of total reality", they are given " without having to speak at the same time of 'God and the world.'”
The Philosophical Act | p. 96 -
“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.”
The Philosophical Act | p. 106 -
“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.”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965)
Joseph Pieper on Happiness
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Leisure is the basis of culture.”
Joseph Pieper on Justice
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Justice unites human beings; injustice separates them.”
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“All just order in the world is based on this, that man give man what is his due.”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965) | Justice (1955) -
“Justice is a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will.”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965)
Joseph Pieper on Knowledge
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“Über den Begriff der Tradition , quoted in Alberto Peratoner, Gli Otto Pilastri della Tradizione , oasicenter.eu , 1 July 2019.”
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“What happens when our eye sees a rose? What do we do when that happens? Our mind does something, to be sure, in the mere fact of taking in the object, grasping its color, its shape, and so on. We have to be awake and active. But all the same, it is a "relaxed" looking, so long as we are merely looking at it and not observing or studying it, counting or measuring its various features. Such observat”
The Ernst Jünger quote is from Blätter und Steine (Hamburg, 1934), p. 202. -
“[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. […] It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive ; a stoniness of heart, that will not brook any resistance — as expressed once, most radically, in the following terrifying statement: "Every action makes sense, even criminal acts … all passivity is senseless.”
p. 14 | The Goethe quote is from his Maximen und Reflexionen , ed. Günther Müller (Stuttgart, 1943), no. 1415. The other quote is from Hermann Rauschning 's Conversations with Hitler ( Gespräche mit Hitler , 1940). -
“The Goethe quote is from his Maximen und Reflexionen , ed. Günther Müller (Stuttgart, 1943), no. 1415. The other quote is from Hermann Rauschning 's Conversations with Hitler ( Gespräche mit Hitler , 1940).”
[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. […] It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive ; a stoniness -
“Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity , first of all, there is leisure as "non-activity" — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. […] Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.”
p. 31 -
“Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough. It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" […] over mere function.”
p. 50 -
“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.”
The Philosophical Act | pp. 106–107
Joseph Pieper on Life
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“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.”
p. 27 -
“Modern religious teachings have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965)
Joseph Pieper on Time
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“Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process — in just the same way as the "simple gaze" of intellectus does not consist in the "duration" (so to speak) of ratio' s working-out process, but instead cuts through it at the perpendicular (the ancients compared the ratio with time, the intellectus with the "always now" of eternity).”
p. 34 -
“Of course in the present day […] 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.”
The Philosophical Act | pp. 64–65
Joseph Pieper on Truth
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Truth is the soul's love of being as it is.”
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“It pertains to the very nature of a philosophical question that its answer will not be a "perfectly rounded truth" (as Parmenides said it), grasped in the hand like an apple plucked from a tree.”
The Philosophical Act | P. 63 -
“"Being precedes Truth, and … Truth precedes the Good."”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965)
Joseph Pieper on Virtue
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Hope is the virtue of the wayfarer.”