Maimonides Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Maimonides, organized by topic.
Browse Maimonides by topic
Maimonides on Death
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“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
Maimonides on God
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“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”
It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.
Maimonides on Justice
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“The general object of the Law is twofold: the well-being of the soul, and the well-being of the body.”
Maimonides on Knowledge
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Astrology is a disease, not a science.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Teach thy tongue to say I do not know, and thou shalt progress.”
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“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 .”
[…] one should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds. -
“There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in degree in different men … I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind … more clever and more learned than it is … I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person … They … express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other sciences about which they know nothing … If met with applause … so does the disease itself become aggravated.”
Aphorisms . Quoted in Bulletin of the History of Medicine , Vol. 3 (1935), p. 555 | Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 640 -
“There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in degree in different men … I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind … more clever and more learned than it is … I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person … They … express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other scienc”
Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 640 -
“We are obligated to be more scrupulous in fulfilling the commandment of charity than any other positive commandment because charity is the sign of a righteous man.”
As quoted in A Maimonides Reader (1972) by Isadore Twersky, p. 135. A footnote on this page states : tzedekah is translated as both " righteousness " and " charity ".
Maimonides on Time
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“There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in degree in different men … I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind … more clever and more learned than it is … I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person … They … express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other scienc”
Aphorisms . Quoted in Bulletin of the History of Medicine , Vol. 3 (1935), p. 555
Maimonides on Truth
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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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“[…] 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
Maimonides on Virtue
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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:
“It is incumbent on every man to consider himself and the entire world as if they were balanced on a scale.”
Things actually not said by Maimonides
A number of widely-shared lines are circulated as Maimonides but are in fact from someone else. Did Maimonides say these? No. Each entry below pairs the line with the person who actually wrote it.
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Did Maimonides say this? No.
“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.