Émile Durkheim Quotes

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

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

~ Émile Durkheim

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

~ Émile Durkheim

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.

~ Émile Durkheim

Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.

~ 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

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

~ Émile Durkheim

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

~ Émile Durkheim

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.

~ 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

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

~ Émile 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.

~ 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

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

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

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

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.

~ Émile Durkheim

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.

~ Émile Durkheim