Maimonides Quotes - Page 3

He who immerses himself in sexual intercourse will be assailed by premature aging, his strength will wane, his eyes will weaken, and a bad odour will emit from his mouth and his armpits, his teeth will fall out and many other maladies will afflict him.

It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision.

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!

Medical practice is not knitting and weaving and the labor of the hands, but it must be inspired with soul and be filled with understanding and equipped with the gift of keen observation . . .

Hear the truth from whomever says it

Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.

Contrast the experience with something worse and you cannot help feeling happy and grateful because... The change from trouble to comfort gives us more pleasure than uninterrupted comfort does.

That which is produced with intention has passed over from non-existence to existence.

One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good - he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad - he and the world is destroyed.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother's love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.

Astrology is not an art, it is a disease.

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

Your purpose...should always be to know...the whole that was intended to be known.

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.

The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion, neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition. Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those in our country who are like these. I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, and a mental faculty above that of the monkey.

Actions are divided as regards their object into four classes; they are either purposeless , unimportant , or vain , or good .

You will see the mercy of God toward His creatures, how He has provided that which is required, in proper proportions, and treated all individual beings of the same species with perfect equality. ...for it is an act of great and perfect goodness that He gave us existence; and the creation of the controlling faculty in animals is a proof of His mercy towards them, as has been shown by us.

In so far as the soul is a force residing in the body; it has therefore been said that the properties of the soul depend of the condition of the body.

If men possessed wisdom, which stands in the same relation to the form of man as the sight to the eye, they would not cause any injury to themselves or to others, for the knowledge of the truth removes hatred and quarrels, and prevents mutual injuries.

The knowledge of God, the formation of ideas, the mastery of desire and passion, the distinction between that which is to be chosen and that which is to be rejected, all these man owes to his form.

Every man whose character traits all lie in the mean is called a wise man.

Inspire me with love for my art and for thy creatures. In the sufferer let me see only the human being.

It is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not imagine that the whole universe exists only for him.

God is identical with His attributes, so that it may be said that He is the knowledge, the knower, and the known.