Top 73 Durkheim's Quotes
#1. War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion.
Rene Girard
#2. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#3. 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
#4. Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.
Emile Durkheim
#5. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#6. 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
#7. 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
Emile Durkheim
#8. 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
#9. figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he
Jonathan Haidt
#10. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#11. The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
Emile Durkheim
#12. 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
#13. There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
Emile Durkheim
#14. One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.
Emile Durkheim
#15. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#16. The fundamental proposition of the apriorist theory is that knowledge is made up of two sorts of elements, which cannot be reduced into one another, and which are like two distinct layers superimposed one upon the other.
Emile Durkheim
#17. Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
Emile Durkheim
#18. 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
#19. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
Emile Durkheim
#20. It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.
Emile Durkheim
#21. 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
#22. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#23. The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.
Emile Durkheim
#25. Hence we are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.
Emile Durkheim
#26. If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Emile Durkheim
#27. 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
#28. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
Emile Durkheim
#29. It is said that we do not make the guilty party suffer for the sake of suffering; it is nonetheless true that we find it right that he should suffer.
Emile Durkheim
#30. ...Solidarity is, literally something which the society possesses.
Emile Durkheim
#31. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#32. Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
Emile Durkheim
#33. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#34. When man discovered the mirror, he began to lose his soul.
Emile Durkheim
#35. Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
Emile Durkheim
#36. 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
#37. At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
Emile Durkheim
#38. 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
#39. A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
Emile Durkheim
#40. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#41. Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it.
Emile Durkheim
#42. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#43. 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
#44. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
Emile Durkheim
#45. 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
#46. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#47. When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
Emile Durkheim
#48. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#49. 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
#50. Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
Emile Durkheim
#51. Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
Emile Durkheim
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#55. When this ultimate crisis comes... when there is no way out - that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope.
Emile Durkheim
#56. It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions.
Emile Durkheim
#57. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#58. It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
Emile Durkheim
#59. The human person, whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods.
Emile Durkheim
#60. When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
Emile Durkheim
#61. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
Emile Durkheim
#62. There are two types of men: the great and the small.
Emile Durkheim
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
Emile Durkheim
#66. 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
Emile Durkheim
#67. 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
#68. It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
Emile Durkheim
#69. Just as reflection disappears to the extent that thought and action take the form of automatic habits, it awakes only when accepted habits become disorganized.
Emile Durkheim
#70. 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.
Emile Durkheim
#71. The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.
Emile Durkheim
#72. 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
#73. 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.
Emile Durkheim
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