179 Quotes by Maimonides

God is identical with His attributes, so that it may be said that He is the knowledge, the knower, and the known.

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.

It is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not imagine that the whole universe exists only for him.

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

The true work of God is all good, since it is existence.

The Mutakallemim... apply the term non-existence only to absolute non-existence, and not to absence of properties. A property and the absence of that property are considered by them as two opposites, they treat, e.g. , blindness and sight, death and life, in the same way as heat and cold. Therefore they say, without any qualification, non-existence does not require any agent, an agent is required when something is produced.

The question, "What is the purpose thereof?" cannot be asked about anything which is not the product of an agent; therefore we cannot ask what is the purpose of the existence of God.

Every man whose character traits all lie in the mean is called a wise man.

First Theory . There is no Providence at all for anything in the Universe; all parts of the Universe, the heavens and what they contain, owe their origin to accident and chance; there exists no being that rules and governs them or provides for them. This is the theory of Epicurus ...