Moses Mendelssohn quotes

Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and one of the most influential figures of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). His writings promoted religious tolerance and advocated for civil rights and rational thinking. He helped lay the foundations for modern Jewish philosophy and improved Jewish integration into European society. Here are 18 of his quotes:

Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation, of no revealed religion in the sense in which that term is usually understood.

Moses Mendelssohn

The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and benificence. The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him.

Moses Mendelssohn

Divine religion ... does not prod men with an iron rod; it guides them with bands of love. It draws no avenging sword, dispenses no temporal goods, assumes no right to any earthly possessions, and claims no external power over the mind. Its weapons are reason and persuasion; its strength is the divine power of truth.

Moses Mendelssohn

The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and beneficence.

Moses Mendelssohn

The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and benificence.

Moses Mendelssohn

A God is thinkable, therefore a God is also actually present.

Moses Mendelssohn

Both state and church have as their object actions as well as convictions, the former insofar as they are based on the relations between man and nature, the latter insofar as they are based on the relations between nature and God.

Moses Mendelssohn

I am, therefore there is a God.

Moses Mendelssohn

When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination.

Moses Mendelssohn

Socrates' fame spread all over Greece, and the most respected and educated men from all around came to him, in order to enjoy his friendly company and instruction.

Moses Mendelssohn

Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another.

Moses Mendelssohn

We would be able neither to remember nor to reflect nor to compare nor to think, indeed, we would not even be the person who we were a moment ago, if our concepts were divided among many and were not to be encountered somewhere together in their most exact combination.

Moses Mendelssohn

You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes.

Moses Mendelssohn

Consciousness of myself, combined with complete ignorance of everything that does not fall within my sphere of thinking, is the most telling proof of my substantiality outside God, of my original existence.

Moses Mendelssohn

Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.

Moses Mendelssohn

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Moses Mendelssohn