“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.”

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

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.

As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it, the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave.

Because it is so unbelievable, the Truth often escapes being known.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.