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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.

Emile Durkheim

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Emile Durkheim
Age: 59 †
Born: 1858
Born: January 1
Died: 1917
Died: January 1
Anthropologist
Historian Of Religion
Philosopher
Professor
Sociologist
Troyes
Aube France
Emile Durkheim
Social
Belongs
Cannot
Abandon
Become
Aim
Nothing
Sees
Men
Rule
Demoralize
Pressure
Aims
Higher
Attached
Free
Submit

More quotes by Emile Durkheim

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We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
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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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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
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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.
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When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
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The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
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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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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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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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Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
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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.
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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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A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
Emile Durkheim
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Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.
Emile Durkheim
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Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.
Emile Durkheim
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Each new generation is reared by its predecessor the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.
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While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.
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One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.
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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.
Emile Durkheim