Maimonides 1138 – 1204
Moses ben Maimon, known to the Latin West as Maimonides and to Jewish tradition by the acronym Rambam, was a medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher, physician, and Torah scholar of the 12th century. Born in Cordoba in al-Andalus and ultimately settling in Egypt, he served as personal physician to the court of Saladin while producing the most ambitious systematic works in medieval Jewish thought. His Mishneh Torah codified Jewish law in fourteen books, and his Guide for the Perplexed sought to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish revelation, influencing not only later Jewish thought but Islamic and Christian scholasticism, particularly through Thomas Aquinas. His Thirteen Principles of Faith remain a defining statement of Jewish theological belief. He is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of medieval Jewish tradition.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Sephardic Jewish
- Era
- Medieval
- Movements
- Medieval, Jewish
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Astrology is a disease, not a science.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“It is incumbent on every man to consider himself and the entire world as if they were balanced on a scale.”
Quotes that are not actually from Maimonides
These lines are widely circulated as Maimonides, but they do not appear in Maimonides's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Although sometimes attributed to Maimonides as a teaching on the highest form of charity, this proverb in its modern English form does not appear in the Mishneh Torah or any other surviving work of Maimonides. Researchers including Quote Investigator trace the earliest near-form English versions to the 19th century, including a 1885 work by the novelist Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie. Maimonides did write on a hierarchy of charitable giving in Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Matnot Aniyim 10:7, in which the highest form is to make the recipient self-sufficient, which is likely the loose source of the misattribution.