Emile Durkheim Quotes
Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.
When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.
It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.
Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.
The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result
By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings.
There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.
Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
Even one well-made observation will be enough in many cases, just as one well-constructed experiment often suffices for the establishment of a law.
The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty.
Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.
An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.
Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations reality is therefore abandoned.
Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.
The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life.
