"The act of philosophizing, genuine poetry, any aesthetic encounter, in
fact, as well as prayer, springs from some shock. And when such a shock
is experienced, man senses the non-finality of this world of daily
care." - Pieper, The Philophical Act, I

"We therefore hope that this sense of sacramental visibility may become
so manifest in the celebration of the Christian cultus itself that in
the performance of if man, 'who is born to work', may truly be
'transported' out of the weariness of daily labour into an unending
holiday, carried away out of the straitness of the workaday world into
the heart of the universe." - Pieper, Leisure, V

"it has always been a pious belief that God sends his good gifts and his
blessings in sleep." Pieper, Leisure, III

Now the highest form of affirmation is the feast; among its
characteristics, Karl Kerényi tells us, is 'the union of tranquility,
contemplation, and intensity of life'. To hold a celebration means to
affirm the basic meaningfulness of the universe and a sense of oneness
with it, of inclusion within it." - Pieper, Leisure, III

"The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary
should function flawlessly and without a breakdown, but that the
functionary should continue to be a man ... that he should retain the
faculty of grasping the world as a whole and realifing his full
potentialities as an entity meant to reach Wholeness." - Pieper,
Leisure, III

"...the power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of
the workaday world and reach out to superhuman, life-giving existential
forces which refresh and renew us before we turn back to our daily work.
Only in leisure ... man may escape from the 'restricted area' of that
'latent anxiety' which a keen observer has perceived to be the mark of
the world of work, where 'work and unemployment are the two inescapable
poles of existence." - Pieper, Leisure, IiI