Emile Durkheim Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“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.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“The Christian conceives of his abode on Earth in no more delightful colors than the Jainist sectarian. He sees in it only a time of sad trial; he also thinks that his true country is not of this world.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Man seeks to learn, and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. It is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“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.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“When man discovered the mirror, he began to lose his soul.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one's inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“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.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“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.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“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.”
-- Emile Durkheim -
“Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.”
-- Emile Durkheim
