Benji

“Maimonides translated Aristotle's fundamental concept into Jewish ethical terms: 'Good deeds are such as are equibalanced, maintaining the mean between two equally bad extremes ... Virtues are psychic conditions and dispositions which are midway between two reprehensible extremes.”
― Alberto Manguel, Maimonides: Faith in Reason

“Rather than a proper guide to an intellectual maze, the Guide can seem at first glance like an intellectual maze itself.”
― Alberto Manguel, Maimonides: Faith in Reason

“Hesse wrote an essay on what he saw as the world's publishing crisis and the fate of the book. Hesse concluded his talk with these words: 'Only a few sacred books that humankind treasures hold the regenerating power and survive throughout the millennia and the world crises. It is reassuring to see that the situation does not depend on the distribution of these works. It is not necessary for millions, even hundreds of thousands of readers to have appropriated for themselves this or that sacred book. It is enough that a few people should have been touched by them.”
― Alberto Manguel, Maimonides: Faith in Reason

“No man should believe anything.' Maimonides strenuously affirmed, 'Unless attested by one of three principles. First, rational proof as in mathematical sciences; secondly, the perception by one of the five senses ... and thirdly, tradition as derived from the prophets and the righteous.' In statements like this, Maimonides stands as the emblematic believer in rationality as the single most powerful instrument for approaching the truth. Coleridge, once more, echoed this Maimonidean belief in 1818: 'This again is the mystery and the dignity of our human nature, that we cannot give up our reason, without giving up at the same time our individual personality ... He who asserts that truth is of no importance except in the sense of sincerity, confounds sense with madness, and the word of God with a dream.”
― Alberto Manguel, Maimonides: Faith in Reason