1. “When man discovered the mirror, he began to lose his soul.”
2. “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.”
3. “Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.”
4. “Socialism is not science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.”
5. “When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when orals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.”
6. “We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is acrie because we condemn it.”
7. “A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.”
8. “Faith is not uprooted by dialect proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.”
9. “Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.”
10. “Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. the movement is circular.”
11. “The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.”
12. “It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.”
13. “If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”
14. “It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily announced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.”
15. “The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty.”
16. “There is no sociology worth of the name which does not possess a historical character.”
17. “The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.”
18. “At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.”
19. “Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.”
20. “Reality seem valueless by comparison with dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.”
21. “Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.”
22. “Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.”
23. “To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.”
24. “It is science and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.”
25. “Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.”
26. “There are two types of men: the great and the small.”
27. “By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane things.”
28. “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.”
29. “Our hole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.”
30. “Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.”
