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.
EMILE DURKHEIMSocialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
More Emile Durkheim Quotes
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The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.
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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.
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Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
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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.
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A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
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Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
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If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
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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.
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Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
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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.
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When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
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Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
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At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
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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.
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Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.
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Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
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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.
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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.
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To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
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There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
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I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.
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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.
EMILE DURKHEIM