Famous Maimonides Quotes Explained
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. Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) wrote both as a Jewish legal authority (the <em>Mishneh Torah</em>) and as a philosophical theologian (the <em>Guide for the Perplexed</em>). Below are eight of the most-quoted lines.
Attributed to Maimonides:
“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”
What it means
Attributed to Maimonides in later anthologies; the substance is consistent with the practical-philosophical advice scattered through the Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides's view is that paralysis under uncertainty is itself a failure of practical reason, and that acting on the best available judgement is the rational duty even when error is possible.
Attributed to Maimonides:
“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”
What it means
From the Mishneh Torah, where Maimonides ranks the eight degrees of charity. The highest degree is preventing the conditions that produce dependence in the first place — through employment, partnership, or interest-free loans — so that the recipient never needs to receive alms at all.
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.”
What it means
From the introduction to the Mishneh Torah and echoed in the Guide. Truth, in Maimonides's epistemology, is independent of the social distribution of belief; consensus and dissent are evidence about people, not about reality.
Attributed to Maimonides:
“Astrology is a disease, not a science.”
What it means
From Maimonides's Letter on Astrology to the rabbis of Marseilles. Maimonides argues that astrology fails the standards of both demonstration and observation, and that crediting it confuses chance correlation with causal knowledge. The position is sharper than Aquinas's parallel discussion a century later.
Attributed to Maimonides:
“Teach thy tongue to say I do not know, and thou shalt progress.”
What it means
From the Guide for the Perplexed, in Maimonides's discussions of negative theology. Acknowledged ignorance, in his view, is the precondition of intellectual progress: the mind that names its limits has room to grow; the mind that does not has none.
Attributed to Maimonides:
“The general object of the Law is twofold: the well-being of the soul, and the well-being of the body.”
What it means
From the Guide for the Perplexed, Part III. The dual purpose of divine Law, for Maimonides, is to secure the conditions for moral and civil life (the body) and to direct the intellect toward truth about God (the soul). The double function explains why some commandments look purely social and others purely theological.
“[…] one should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds.”
Foreword to The Eight Chapters Of Maimonides On Ethics , translated by Joseph I. Gorfinkle, Ph.D. Columbia University Press, New York (1912). Page 35-36 . | Variant: "Accept the truth from whatever source it comes." Introduction to the Shemonah Peraqim , as quoted in Truth and Compassion: Essays on Judaism and Religion in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Solomon Frank (1983) Edited by Howard Joseph, Jack Natha
What it means
From the introduction to Maimonides's commentary on the Pirkei Avot (the "Eight Chapters"). The principle authorises study of pagan and Muslim sources — Aristotle in particular — on the grounds that truth's pedigree does not change its truth value. It became a Jewish formulation of intellectual openness.
“It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.”
Sefer Hamitzvot [ Book of the Commandments ], commentary on Negative Commandment 290, as translated by Charles B. Chavel (1967); also in Defending the Human Spirit : Jewish Law's Vision for a Moral Society (2006) by Warren Goldstein, p. 269
What it means
From the Sefer Hamitzvot, in Maimonides's commentary on Negative Commandment 290. The principle of in dubio pro reo — when in doubt, side with the accused — is grounded by Maimonides in the asymmetry of harms: a guilty person who escapes can be tried again, an innocent person who is executed cannot be revived.