9 quotes
Worship itself is a given — or it does not exist at all.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
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.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
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.'
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
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.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
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.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
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.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
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 ratios 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).
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
If someone needs the "unusual" to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being. The hunger for the sensational, posing, as it may, in "bohemian garb," is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the true power of wonder, for a bourgeois-ized humanity.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)
No less incommensurable with the working-world than the philosophical question is the sound of true poetry. […] The lover, too, stands outside the tight chain of efficiency of this working world, and [so does] whoever else approaches the margin of existence through some deep existential disturbance (which always brings a "shattering" of one's environment), or through, say, the proximity of death.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)