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

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.

The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.

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 his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.

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.

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.

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.

That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.

It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.

Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.

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.

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.

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.

At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Families are a kind of leaven that helps to make the world more humane and more fraternal, where no one feels rejected or abandoned.

If you’re sick, if you’re struggling, if you’re worried about how you’re going to get through the day – we will not abandon you. We will not leave you to face these challenges alone.

The Lord does not abandon us! Even if we are men and women ‘of little faith.

I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me.

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true.

Anything worth putting off is worth abandoning altogether.