“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.”

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.

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

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.

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.

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

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

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.

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.

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

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.

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

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.

Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.

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.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.