Emile Durkheim Quotes

Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.

The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.

A man needs a private life. With no ability to have a private life, one thing leads to another, and before you know it we have Bill and Monica. We need to get real about things. Humans are humans. Why should we expect more?

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

No man stops caring as long as he breathes. As long as he has a mind and memory, he will care. This is what separates us from the animals. We have feelings.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart.

You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhaps;but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.

We said we would meet again but we made no arrangements. Not out of any bad feeling between us, but because I felt it had all been said, or not said but understood, and she probably did too. To know she was there was enough, and for her to know I was around was probably too. Sometimes that's all people ever really need. Just to know.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

You don't need words to express feelings.

... if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?

A pure heart and mind only takes you so far - sooner or later the hormones have their say, too.

Kindness is wisdom. There is none in life But needs it and may learn.

Love is the only human emotion that cannot be controlled.

I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.

The normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling.

Democrats believe people are basically good but must be saved from themselves by the government. Republicans believe people are basically bad but they'll be okay if they're left alone.

What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.