If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.

Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.

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.

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.

This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality... Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it... when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life.

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.