Pieper: “the loving pursuit of wisdom”

“ONLY out of the soil of “loving pursuit of wisdom”, indeed of true philo-sophia, could this be said: “The smallest amount of knowledge about the most sublime realities is more desirable than the most perfect knowledge about the lowest things’; “though we may hardly touch the things supreme and divine, their knowledge is nonetheless more important to us than all the things of this our world together; just as it is so much sweeter to catch but a glimpse, however fleeting, of the beloved than to have exact knowledge of many other, even important things.” The first of these quotations is found in the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas [I, 1, 5, ad 1.]. The author of the second statement is Aristotle…”

~Josef Pieper: In Defense of Philosophy, p. 89.

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