Josef Pieper Quotes

29 quotes in 534 categories

• Surrender to sensuality paralyzes the powers of the moral person.
• Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.
• To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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;…
• 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…
• 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…
• Happiness is essentially a gift; we are not the forgers of our own felicity.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Being precedes Truth, and … Truth precedes the Good.
• Modern religious teaching have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.
• 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…
• Justice is a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Of course the world of work begins to become - threatens to become - our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands…

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