In response to the intensifying vocationalisation and instrumentalisation of education, scholars have invoked the ideal of leisure and its educational embodiment in the tradition of liberal learning. Drawing on the work of Josef Pieper, this article seeks to bring to the fore an overlooked yet fundamental aspect of leisure, that of existential rest, a state of being and a mode of engagement with the world in which the basic outlook is one of affirmation of the goodness of the world, which is experienced as being in harmony with oneself and the world. The article also suggests three different approaches to cultivating existential rest in education derived from the educational visions of Pieper, Michael Oakeshott and John Dewey.