Moses Maimonides Quotes

The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it

No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.

Your purpose...should always be to know...the whole that was intended to be known.

All the evils that men cause to each other because of certain desires, or opinions or religious principles, are rooted in ignorance. [All hatred would come to an end] when the earth was flooded with the knowledge of God.

Commune with your own heart on your bed and be still.

It is better to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death

Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides,

Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

God has no attributes.

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204, also known as Maimonides), put it: Every time you find in our books a tale the reality of which seems impossible, a story which is repugnant both to reason and common sense, then be sure that tale contains a profound allegory veiling a deeply mysterious truth…and the greater the absurdity of the letter the deeper the wisdom of the spirit.16

For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.

It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

From the first to the mid-fourth century, before various creed were increasingly formalized, many Christian monks were open to exploring other traditions along with their own, just as monastics today often include writings that range from the works of Moses Maimonides to the Buddhist sutras; apparently they were less concerned with what to believe than with the deepening their spiritual practice.

Going back to Moses Maimonides, he considers Jesus that prophet who was authorized by God to prepare the heathen world (as Messiah for the heathens) for the salvation expected by Israel. I judge this attitude of a Jew very positively because he uses the same category of thought as Christian theology. This says that the Hebrew Bible is a preparation for the Gospel, and Lapide says that Christianity is a preparation of the heathen world for the Jewish Messiah.

… the philosopher Moses Maimonides declared that the return to Israel was the only hope of an end to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Arabs, of whom he writes that ‘Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.

Maimonides considered himself a disciple of Aristotle,[129] saw Moses as the chief philosopher, and even referred to [rabbinic] Judaism as a philosophical religion.[

[...] One chief difference between the medieval "scientist" and the scientist of to-day[1948] lies in the nature of the first principles accepted and in the attitude adopted toward them. The modern scientist has seen the breakdown of too many first principles to accept any as eternal truths. He proceeds inductively, building up slowly on the basis of observed facts. His attitude to his own (or at least to his brother's scientist) first principles is one of hesitation, even suspicion. He looks on them as "working hypotheses" to be modified or changed in the light of further experience. The older scientist, although he too realized that his function wa to explain facts, closed the door on fresh evidence too soon. The modern, at least in theory, keeps it always open. But there is a further and perhaps more interesting difference between them. The medieval thinker aimed at comprehensiveness. he seems not to be satisfied with anything short of the whole. The modern thinker is more modest and seeks the key not to the universe but to one group of facts within it. He likes to break problems up and resolve them bit by bit. He is not interested (that is professionally speaking) in the world as a whole, but only in one small corner of it. Herein lies the traditional distinction between "science" and "philosophy." both science and philosophy try to discover principles and interpret detail in their light; but whereas science tries to clear up small areas of the world, philosophy aims at the world as a whole. it stands in relation to the various sciences much as each science stands in relation to the various sciences much as each science stands in relation to its particular subject-matter. It is the science which seeks to reduce to the scientific unity and order the results of the various sciences. [...]

Our sages commanded that one should not teach one’s daughter Torah because the minds of most women are incapable of concentrating on learning, and thus, because of their intellectual poverty, they turn the words of Torah into words of nonsense. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Torah Study,” 1:13