The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.

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.

Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action.

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

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

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

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