Émile Durkheim Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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.

Émile Durkheim
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.

Émile Durkheim
Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Émile Durkheim
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

Émile Durkheim
There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Émile Durkheim
A passion for the infinite is daily presented as a sign of moral distinction, when in fact it can only occur in disturbed minds which accord the status of a norm to the very disturbance from which they are suffering.

Émile Durkheim
Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.

Émile Durkheim
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.

Émile Durkheim
At this point, an urgent question arises: … Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism? Briefly, is the division of labor, at the same time that it is a law of nature, also a moral rule of human conduct; and, if it has this latter character, why and in what degree?

Émile 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.

Émile Durkheim
Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.

Émile 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.

Émile Durkheim
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

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

Émile Durkheim
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.

Émile Durkheim
Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.

Émile 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.

Émile Durkheim
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.

Émile Durkheim
A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.

Émile Durkheim
At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.

Émile Durkheim
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.

Émile 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.

Émile 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.

Émile 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.

Émile Durkheim
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.

Émile Durkheim
If one class of society is obliged, in order to live, to take any price for its services, while another can abstain from such action thanks to resources at its disposal which, however, are not necessarily due to any social superiority, the second has an unjust advantage over the first at law. In other words, there cannot be rich and poor a birth without there being unjust contracts.

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

Émile 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;

Émile Durkheim
It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Émile 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.

Émile Durkheim