Emile Durkheim Quotes About Human Nature

Quotes about: Human Nature

• Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.

  Emile Durkheim

  Men, Groups, Causes

  Emile Durkheim (2014). “The Division of Labor in Society”, p.311, Simon and Schuster

• Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

  Emile Durkheim

  Reality, Thinking, Groups

• 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.

  Emile Durkheim

  Independent, Exercise, Acting

  "The Rules of Sociological Method". Book by Emile Durkheim (p. 10), 1895.

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

  Emile Durkheim

  Fundamentals, Firsts, Facts

  "The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method".

• 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.

  Emile Durkheim

  Different, Behaviour, Actors

  Emile Durkheim (2005). “Suicide: A Study in Sociology”, p.41, Routledge

• It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

  Emile Durkheim

  Feelings, Needs, Variables

  John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (2010). “Suicide”, p.247, Simon and Schuster

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