Émile Durkheim Quotes

There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, m...

A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacr...

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations reality is therefore a...

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science o...

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the l...

The Christian conceives of his abode on Earth in no more delightful colors than the Jainist sectaria...

Man seeks to learn, and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; ...

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to under...

The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equ...

Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unab...

If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society i...

The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exha...

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable...

When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown...

Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.

Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself...

One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is ...

Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which...

Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sa...

It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history,...