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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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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
Life
Disappear
Morality
Moral
Society
Lives
Social
Men

More quotes by 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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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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Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
Emile Durkheim
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There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
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
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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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Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
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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The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.
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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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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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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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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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
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It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
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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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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The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
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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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