Joseph Pieper Quotes on Knowledge

Quotes

• Attributed to Joseph Pieper:

  “Leisure is the basis of culture.”

• Attributed to Joseph Pieper:

  “Truth is the soul's love of being as it is.”

• “Über den Begriff der Tradition , quoted in Alberto Peratoner, Gli Otto Pilastri della Tradizione , oasicenter.eu , 1 July 2019.”

  Wikiquote

• “The Ernst Jünger quote is from Blätter und Steine (Hamburg, 1934), p. 202.”

  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

• “[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