Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.

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.

Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

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.

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.