Quote

To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.

Emile Durkheim

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
States
Unhappiness
Perpetual
Definition
Definitions
Pursue
Oneself
Goal
Unattainable
State
Condemn

More quotes by Emile Durkheim

Image
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
Image
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.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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
Image
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.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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.
Emile Durkheim
Image
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
Emile Durkheim
Image
There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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
Image
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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
Image
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.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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
Image
Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
Emile Durkheim
Image
Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
Emile Durkheim
Image
We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
Emile Durkheim
Image
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
Image
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