על החלומות, ספר ב כ׳On Dreams, Book II 20
א׳
1[139] What he means is this: “Shall I right reason come: shall fruitful instruction the mother and nurse of the soul-company that yearns for knowledge come too, shall the children of us two press forward, and shall we all standing straight opposite ranged in order with lifted hands address our prayers to vanity?
ב׳
2[140] Shall we first bow and then cast ourselves to the ground in supplication and obeisance?” No, may the sun never shine on these happenings, since deep darkness befits things evil and bright light the good, and what greater evil could there be than that vanity the fictitious and deceiver should receive praise and admiration, usurping the place of its opposite, simplicity in whom there is no fiction or falsity.
ג׳
3[141] There is a further excellent lesson in the words, “The father retained the saying” (Gen. 37:11). For surely it is the business of a soul which is no youngster nor barren nor sterile but verily an elder and skilled in parenthood, to take caution for its lifemate, to despise nothing at all but to crouch in awe before the power of God which none can evade or defeat, and to look with circumspection to see what end shall befall it.
ד׳
4[142] And so the oracles say that the sister of Moses, to whom we who deal in allegory give the name of “Hope,” “spied out from a distance” (Ex. 2:4), looking doubtless to the consummation of life, that it may meet us with good auspice sent down from high heaven by the Consummator.
ה׳
5[143] For many a time and to many has it happened that they have crossed wide spaces of navigable waters and passed a long voyage in safety escorted by favourable breezes, and then in the harbour itself have suddenly been shipwrecked just when they were on the point to cast anchor.
ו׳
6[144] Multitudes, too, have fought manfully for years in cruel warfare and remained unwounded without even a scratch or a pin-prick: they have returned in mirth and in gladness as though war were a public festival and a civic banquet, without a limb missing or unsound, and then in their own homes have been conspired against by those who should have been the last to do such a deed and slaughtered as the saying goes like “oxen at the stall.”