Emile Durkheim Quotes

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.
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.
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.
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.
From the physical point of view, a man is nothing more than a system of cells, or from the mental point of view, than a system of representations; in either case, he differs only in degree from animals.
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
It is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions.
It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
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.
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
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.
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
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.
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
12next›last»
Total Records : 31

Related Books

Author Profile

Votes :
Rating :
AuthorName
Emile Durkheim
Profession
Sociologist
BirthDate
15 April, 1858
DeathDate
15 November, 1917
View Profile

Share to your friends..

Related Author

Auguste Comte Emile Durkheim Jean Baudrillard Pierre Bourdieu
view more

Popular Topics

Attitude Death Inspirational Life Love Motivational Nature Positive