"The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit"
About this Quote
A line like this lands with the clean, wicked snap of a court provocation: Avicenna drawing a bright border and daring you to tell him he got the map wrong. The division is obviously too neat to be sociologically true, which is the point. By overstating it, he exposes the rivalry he saw between two ways of claiming authority in his world: the quick intelligence that prizes argument, and the devout certainty that prizes submission.
Calling it “wit” matters. He doesn’t say “reason” or “knowledge,” the sober terms a philosopher might prefer. “Wit” suggests agility, the ability to see around corners, to detect contradictions and social pretenses. Religion, in this framing, isn’t spirituality or ethics; it’s an institution of answers. The subtext is a complaint about enforced seriousness: when belief is policed, humor becomes a diagnostic tool, a way to show where doctrine can’t tolerate ambiguity.
Context sharpens the barb. Avicenna lived in the Islamic Golden Age, where philosophy, medicine, and theology were intertwined and sometimes at war. Think of the recurring charge that philosophers smuggled in dangerous ideas under the cover of logic. The quote reads like a defensive offense: if the pious accuse him of irreverence, he flips the accusation into an intellectual one. Religion without wit becomes not just unfunny, but brittle; wit without religion becomes not just clever, but ungovernable.
It’s less a taxonomy of people than a critique of cultures that force you to choose between thinking freely and belonging safely.
Calling it “wit” matters. He doesn’t say “reason” or “knowledge,” the sober terms a philosopher might prefer. “Wit” suggests agility, the ability to see around corners, to detect contradictions and social pretenses. Religion, in this framing, isn’t spirituality or ethics; it’s an institution of answers. The subtext is a complaint about enforced seriousness: when belief is policed, humor becomes a diagnostic tool, a way to show where doctrine can’t tolerate ambiguity.
Context sharpens the barb. Avicenna lived in the Islamic Golden Age, where philosophy, medicine, and theology were intertwined and sometimes at war. Think of the recurring charge that philosophers smuggled in dangerous ideas under the cover of logic. The quote reads like a defensive offense: if the pious accuse him of irreverence, he flips the accusation into an intellectual one. Religion without wit becomes not just unfunny, but brittle; wit without religion becomes not just clever, but ungovernable.
It’s less a taxonomy of people than a critique of cultures that force you to choose between thinking freely and belonging safely.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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