If you’re like most IB students addressing TOK, you know that optional themes may be a great advantage or a pain. From what I’ve seen, knowledge and religion is one issue that always generates interesting discussions. This theme can really give your TOK exhibition or essay more meaning if you use it right. And this is where things get interesting: famous quotes on religion can spark new thoughts, questions, and sharp analysis.
How to Use Famous Quotes on Religion in TOK?
You can add a quote to your TOK exhibition, but you must explain it. For example, Voltaire said, “Faith is believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.” This quote can start a great discussion about belief systems and reasonable thought.
In fact, I always tell my students that the best quote-object pairs are ones in which the quote questions what the object says.
A good quote can help support or disagree with a knowledge claim in the TOK essay. You could use a quote to introduce a point of view and then use TOK tools to examine it, such as counterarguments, real-life examples, and ideas like proof or certainty.
From what I’ve seen, students often make the mistake of repeating without judging. That won’t get you a lot of points. Have you thought about what this quote is based on? Who might disagree, and why?
Don’t forget that not all quotes are the same. A good TOK quote isn’t clear, can be interpreted differently, and can be used in real life. It shouldn’t just restate an opinion; it should make you think.
Now, it gets fun: if you want to write from a skeptical point of view, pick a quote you disagree with. If you’re going to defend religion as a way to know, choose one that backs up your point of view. The important thing is that you use the quote to start your case, not to make your point.
Top Famous Quotes on Religion for TOK Discussions
Here are famous quotes on religion that would be perfect for the IB TOK.
Faith, Belief, and the Nature of Religious Knowledge
- “Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.” – Voltaire
- “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.” – Paul Tillich
- “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” – Saint Augustine
- “Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.” – Elisabeth Elliot
- “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” – Rabindranath Tagore
- “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
- “Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith her right.” – John Donne
- “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” – Thomas Aquinas
- “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” – C.S. Lewis
Religion and Society, Power, and Ethics
- “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people.” – Karl Marx
- “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.” – Epictetus
- “Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.” – Blaise Pascal
- “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
- “The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.” – Arthur C. Clarke
- “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire
- “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” – Jonathan Swift
- “The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.” – Richard Francis Burton
Unity, Pluralism, and the Search for Meaning
- “The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church.” – Khalil Gibran
- “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” – Dalai Lama
- “Religion is what an individual does with his own solitariness.” – Alfred North Whitehead
- “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” – Meister Eckhart
- “Even though religions are all different, they serve the same purpose — helping people be good.” – Desmond Tutu
- “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.” – Rig Veda (Hindu text)
- “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “At their core, all great religions have the same goal: love, compassion, and justice.” – Karen Armstrong
Religion and Human Nature
- “Man is incurably religious.” – Benjamin Disraeli
- “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” – Søren Kierkegaard
- “A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and is turned out for what he knows.” – Mark Twain
- “Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.” – Heinrich Heine
- “Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world.” – Sigmund Freud
- “A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” – Virginia Woolf
- “To be religious is to have a life that flows with meaning.” – John Shelby Spong
- “What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.” – George Santayana
Critiques and Skepticism of Religion
- “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
- “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.” – Sigmund Freud
- “If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.” – Voltaire
- “The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round.” – Galileo Galilei (attributed)
- “We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” – Gene Roddenberry
- “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect intended us to forgo their use.” – Galileo Galilei
- “I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The world holds two classes of men — intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.” – Abu’l-Ala al-Ma’arri
- “Creeds matter very little… The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” – James Branch Cabell
Religion, Meaning, and the Universe
- “Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there.” – Mohammed Naguib
- “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.” – Carl Sagan
- “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.” – Albert Einstein
- “Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man.” – Howard Thurman
- “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.” – G.K. Chesterton
- “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” – Carl Sagan
- “Religion is man’s attempt to reach God; Christianity teaches that God reached down to man.” – Billy Graham
- “In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Religion is not a theory but a vision. It is not knowledge but wisdom.” – Abraham Joshua Heschel
- “Religion, like poetry, is not a matter of truth or falsity. It is a matter of meaning.” – John Caputo
Interfaith Dialogue and Religious Tolerance
- “We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.” – Kofi Annan
- “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.” – Nelson Mandela
- “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one.” – Elbert Hubbard
- “The holy is found in the differences.” – Krista Tippett
- “I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “To be religious is to perceive the unity of all that is.” – Simone Weil
- “People who are obsessed with religion often become self-righteous, not spiritual.” – Yehuda Berg
- “True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.” – Albert Einstein
- “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: that is love, compassion, and forgiveness.” – Dalai Lama XIV
Religion and Philosophy
- “Religion is philosophy in poetry.” – Alfred North Whitehead
- “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” – Unknown
- “The goal of religion is not to get us into heaven but to get heaven into us.” – Thomas Merton
- “Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
- “It is through philosophy and theology that the human mind reaches for the divine.” – Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
- “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.” – H.L. Mencken
- “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.” – Pope John Paul II
- “Religion begins where philosophy ends.” – Heinrich Heine
- “A religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.” – Isaac Newton
Religious Identity and the Individual
- “Your religion is what you do when the sermon is over.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
- “I am not a religious person, but I am spiritual.” – Paulo Coelho
- “Religion is a personal matter. It’s something each individual must define for themselves.” – Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)
- “I do not belong to any religion. My religion is love. Every heart is my temple.” – Rumi
- “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” – Richard Dawkins
- “You do not need to belong to a religion to have a spiritual life.” – Kurt Vonnegut
- “To know a person’s religion, we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.” – Eric Hoffer
- “Religion is not a uniform but a life lived in alignment with conscience.” – Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
- “It is not God that is worshipped, but the group itself glorified.” – Sigmund Freud
- “Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence.” – Paul Tillich
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Religion and the Search for Truth
- “Religion is not about believing in things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you.” – Karen Armstrong
- “Religious truth is not altered by opinion or prejudice.” – Eliza Farnham
- “Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” – Maimonides
- “A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.” – Jerry Coyne
- “Truth is one, and it is eternal. The names of it are many, but the truth is one.” – Sri Ramakrishna
- “The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.” – St. Augustine
- “Religious truth is captive in a small number of books, written in dead languages.” – George Santayana
- “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” – Dalai Lama XIV
- “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
Final Thoughts
You can meet the TOK requirements and enjoy the writing process if you read these quotes with an open mind and a sense of wonder. Also, who knows? That one quote might be what your whole TOK essay was missing. And don’t forget that our TOK and EE writers are always ready to help with your exhibitions or essays.
