1
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
2
It is possible to pray in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world... then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it.Josef Pieper
3
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; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refused to have anything as a gift.Josef Pieper
4
The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire.. "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure. .Josef Pieper
5
Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. "Temple" means.. that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation.. Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days.. and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.Josef Pieper
6
A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder.Josef Pieper