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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

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
Classified
Humans
Accounts
Must
Remain
Inaccessible
Type
Societies
Society
Types
Individual
Description
Science
Describe
Cannot
Scientific
Human
Individuals

More quotes by Emile Durkheim

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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.
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.
Emile Durkheim
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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
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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.
Emile Durkheim
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From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations reality is therefore abandoned.
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.
Emile Durkheim
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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.
Emile Durkheim
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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.
Emile Durkheim
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At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
Emile Durkheim
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When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
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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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
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Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
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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Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
Emile Durkheim
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To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
Emile Durkheim
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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.
Emile Durkheim
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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
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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.
Emile Durkheim
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When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
Emile Durkheim