Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.

Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.

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.

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.

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.