Maimonides Quotes

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.

The irony is that science has served only to show how small human knowledge is.

Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding, can expect only to improve a single science. In every other part of learning, they must be content to follow opinions, which they are not able to examine; and, even in that which they claim as peculiarly their own, can seldom add more than some small particle of knowledge, to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times, the collective labour of a thousand intellects.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

Reason is one thing and faith is another and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

Philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous... So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.

All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence.

To accept reason is impossible if you don't already possess it.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.