Quotes from Émile 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.

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.

Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.

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.

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.

When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back!...Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random

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

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.

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

The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

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.