About Emile Durkheim: David Émile Durkheim is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all hi...
To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
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.
We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.
When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
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.
Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
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 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.
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 ...
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
