15 tweets from “Leisure, The Basis of Culture” (by Josef Pieper)

1. Our new beginning, our re-foundation, calls out immediately for…a defense of leisure.
2. The original meaning of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”.
3. The name for the institutions of education and learning (scola, schule, school) mean “leisure”.
4. Thomas Aquinas: “The goal and the norm of discipline is happiness”.
5. Leisure it is not necessary present in all the external things like “breaks”, “time off”, “weekend” and so on. Leisure is a condition of the soul.
6. Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion – in the real.
7. Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself.
8. Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process.
9. Leisure is not there for the sake of work.
10. Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of “refreshment” will experience its authentic fruit.
11. The ability to be “at leisure” is one of the basic powers of the human soul.
12. Will it be possible to keep the human being from becoming a complete functionary, or “worker”?.
13. It is not enough merely to create the external conditions for leisure.
14. A true de-proletarianization would consist in making available for the working person a meaningful kind of activity that is not work.
15. Culture lives on “worship”.

Josef Pieper

Leisure, The Basis of Culture

Ignatius Press

2012 (original 1904)