A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
EMILE DURKHEIMThe 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.
More Emile Durkheim Quotes
-
-
When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or – which is the same thing – when his goal is infinity.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM -
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM