Emile Durkheim Quotes

It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... There is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world.

The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.

Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.

You tend to think that your time is either the best or the worst, and then when you have a sense of history, you'll realize actually, no, there were times things were quite gusty in the world. I mean, just think, nowadays most people will say they support the advancement of women, woman has been equal, the fact that we're so aware of the gustiness, in a sense, also speaks about the heightening of our own sensitivity.

I think people on antidepressants often lose sexual feelings. I don't mean that I think sex is only about sadness; it is obviously about joy and vitality and birth as well.

Life is sad, life is a bust, all you can do is do what you must.

For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

I'm a downer. I've been depressed my whole life. Figure it out.

Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

Now more than ever the world has to come together to make changes. Just because certain cultures have had long-standing traditions does not mean that in today's world they are acceptable any longer. The world and the environment are evolving and that means we must change our ways as human beings as well.

I've never asked for a happy ending

A cynic who was still saddened whenever his jaundiced view of mankind was confirmed.

I don't think any religion makes any sense and I think people who are into that are really getting duped, and I don't think Judaism makes any more sense than Christianity, and I don't think Christianity makes any more sense than Scientology. But here's a guy, L. Ron Hubbard, who told all his friends, 'Look, I'm gonna start a religion, 'cause I can't make any money as a science fiction writer.' I mean, he admitted that publicly! At least with Jesus Christ, you can't go talk to the guy.

They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.

I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is.

There are no happy endings.

If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.

Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.