Maimonides Quotes on Virtue
Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Hāʾirīn / Moreh Nevukhim, c.1190) and the legal-ethical Mishneh Torah (1180) — particularly the Hilkhot Deʿot (Laws of Character Traits) section — gave classical Jewish philosophy its most influential synthesis of Aristotelian virtue ethics with the rabbinic legal tradition. The central commitment is the doctrine of the middle way: the virtues are the mean dispositions intermediate between paired vices of excess and deficiency, with the practical wisdom of the prophetic tradition supplying the orientation by which the cultivated character settles on the appropriate mean for each individual case. The framework, integrating Aristotelian ethical theory through the Arabic Aristotelian tradition (Alfarabi, Avicenna, Averroes) with the halakhic conception of mitzvot as practical and ethical disciplines, shaped subsequent Jewish ethical thought through Crescas, the kabbalistic ethical tradition, and modern Jewish moral philosophy through Soloveitchik and Levinas.
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:
“It is incumbent on every man to consider himself and the entire world as if they were balanced on a scale.”
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Attributed to Maimonides:
“Teach thy tongue to say I do not know, and thou shalt progress.”
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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.”
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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.