179 Quotes by Maimonides

The fact that laws were given to man, both affirmative and negative, supports the principle, that God’s knowledge of future events does not change their character. The great doubt that presents itself to our mind is the result of the insufficiency of our intellect.

According to Maimonides, the moral faculty would, in fact, not have been required, if man had remained a purely rational being. It is only through the senses that “the knowledge of good and evil” has become indispensable. The narrative of Adam’s fall is, according to Maimonides, an allegory representing the relation which exists between sensation, moral faculty, and intellect.

Man’s shortcomings and sins are all due to the substance of the body and not to its form; while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.

You should recognize that man’s soul, this single entity whose powers and parts we have described, may be compared to matter, and that the power of reasoning is its completed form. As long as the soul lies dormant and does not acquire its form from knowledge, then the nature of the soul is useless and exists in vain.

And so our rabbis decreed that a man should honor his wife more than himself, and love her as much as he loves himself.

The definition of a thing includes its efficient cause; and since God is the Primal Cause, He cannot be defined, or described by a partial definition. A quality, whether psychical, physical, emotional, or quantitative, is always regarded as something distinct from its substratum;.

Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know', and thou shalt progress.

All the great evils which men cause to each other because of certain intentions, desires, opinions, or religious principles, are likewise due to non-existence, because they originate in ignorance, which is absence of wisdom.

The numerous evils to which individual persons are exposed are due to the defects existing in the persons themselves. We complain and seek relief from our own faults; we suffer from the evils which we, by our own free will, inflict on ourselves and ascribe them to God, who is far from being connected with them!