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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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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
Especially
Distinguished
Single
Relative
Environment
Immediately
Others
Contact
Persons
Relation
Person
Subject
Merely
Attributed
Subjects
Autonomy

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
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It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
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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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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
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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.
Emile Durkheim
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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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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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The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
Emile Durkheim
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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
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A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.
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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At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
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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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