Josef Pieper

"Modern religious teachings have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues."

"And as for the close connection between philosophy and poetry, we can refer to a little-known statement by Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics : the Philosopher is akin to the …"

"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…"

"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 …"

"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" of ratios working-out proce…"

"Wonder is defined by Thomas in the Summa Theologiae , as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know."

"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 ev…"

"In leisure — not only there, but certainly there, if anywhere — the truly human is rescued and preserved precisely because the area of the "just human" is left behind over and over again — and this is…"