List of Emile Durkheim Quotes

It Is A Quite Remarkable Fact That The Great Religions Of The Most Civilized Peoples Are More Deeply Fraught With Sadness Than The Simpler Beliefs Of Earlier Societies. This Certainly Does Not Mean That The Current Of Pessimism Is Eventually To Submerge The Other, But It Proves That It Does Not Lose Ground And That It Does Not Seem Destined To Disappear.

Men Have Been Obliged To Make For Themselves A Notion Of What Religion Is, Long Before The Science Of Religions Started Its Methodical Comparisons.

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.

Irrespective Of Any External, Regulatory Force, Our Capacity For Feeling Is In Itself An Insatiable And Bottomless Abyss.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For A Long Time It Has Been Known That The First Systems Of Representations With Which Men Have Pictured To Themselves The World And Themselves Were Of Religious Origin. There Is No Religion That Is Not A Cosmology At The Same Time That It Is A Speculation Upon Divine Things. If Philosophy And The Sciences Were Born Of Religion, It Is Because Religion Began By Taking The Place Of The Sciences And Philosophy.