Emile Durkheim's Quotes

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

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.

It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.