Émile Durkheim > Quotes

“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;”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.”
― Émile Durkheim

“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, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.”
― Émile Durkheim

“Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.”
― Émile Durkheim

“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.”
― 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, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“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, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.”
― 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, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.”
― Émile Durkheim

“It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.”
― 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

“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. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“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.”
― Émile Durkheim

“Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.”
― Émile Durkheim

“...Solidarity is, literally something which the society possesses.”
― Emile Durkheim

“Anyone who has truly practiced a religion knows very well that it is [the set of regularly repeated actions that make up the cult] that stimulates the feelings of joy, inner peace, serenity, and enthusiasm that, for the faithful, stand as experimental proof of their beliefs. The cult is not merely a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly expressed; it is the sum total of means by which that faith is created and recreated periodically. Whether the cult consists of physical operations or mental ones, it is always the cult that is efficacious.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“Hence we are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.”
― Émile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method

“we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends the common consciousness”
― Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

“Things perceived as real become real in their consequences.”
― Émile Durkheim, La Sociología Clásica: Durhkheim y Weber

“Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“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.”
― Émile Durkheim

“Social man...is the masterpiece of existence.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“Methodological rules are for science what rules of law and custom are for conduct.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

“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, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“Here is the confession
once made by a patient to Brierre de Boismont, which perfectly
describes the condition: 'I am employed in a business house. I perform
my regular duties satisfactorily but like an automaton, and when
spoken to, the words sound to me as though echoing in a void. My
greatest torment is the thought of suicide, from which I am never free.
I have been the victim of this impulse for a year; at first it was insignificant; then for about the last two months it has pursued me everywhere,
yet I have no reason to kill myself. . . . My health is good; no one in my family
has been similarly afflicted; I have had no financial losses, my income is
adequate and permits me the pleasures of people of my age.”
― Durkheim Emile, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“Every time a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may rest assured that the explanation is false".”
― Émile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method