"An unslakable thirst is a perpetually renewed source of suffering.”

"One does not advance if one is not walking towards a goal or, which is the same thing, when the goal towards which one is proceeding is infinitely far away."

"Since society to a large extent makes the individual, it makes him to the same degree in its own image. So the material that it needs will not fail it, because it has, so to speak, prepared it with its own hands."

"If the individual gives way to the slightest adversity, it is because the state of society has made him an easy prey for suicide."

"However individualized a person may be, there is always something collective that remains, which is the feeling of depression and melancholy that arises from this exaggerated individualism. When one has nothing else to share, one participates through sadness."

"Individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs. Because it is the whole, the harm that it feels is communicated to the parts of which it is made."

"There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness or merriment and makes them see things in cheerful or sombre colors."

"The more we feel detached from [society], the more we also detach ourselves from this life of which it is at once the source and the goal. Why these rules of morality, the precepts of law, .... the dogmas that impede us, if there is not outside us some being whom they serve and to whom we belong?"

"So let those who look with anxiety and sadness on the collapse of old beliefs ... refrain from accusing knowledge and science of an evil which they have not caused, but which on the contrary they are seeking to cure! Beware of treating them as the enemy! (1/2)

"Learning is not sought as a means to destroy accepted ideas, but because they have already started to collapse. ... It is not dialectical proofs that uproot faith; faith must have been profoundly shaken by other causes for it not to withstand the shock of argument."

"When mankind, after taking its [Catholic] faith ready-made from tradition, demands the right to make this faith for itself, it is not because of the intrinsic appeal of free inquiry — [in fact] this brings with it as many sorrows as it does joys — but because mankind now needs this freedom. (1/2)

"Every kind of suicide is only the exaggerated or deviated form of a virtue."

"Now political freedom is a means, not an end... If it does not serve some end which goes beyond itself, it is not simply useless; it becomes dangerous. It is a battle weapon; if those who wield it do not know how to use it in fruitful struggles, they soon end by turning it against themselves."

"Today, the urgent task which must come before all others is to save our moral patrimony; once it is secure, we will see that it prospers. Let the common danger at least shake us from our torpor and give us back a taste for action!"

"Men of my generation recall how great our enthusiasm was when, twenty years ago, we finally saw the fall of the last barriers which restrained our restlessness. But alas Disenchantment quickly followed. For we soon had to admit that we did not know what to do with this hard-won freedom."

"Today, a wave of sadness and discouragement has swept over society; tomorrow, on the contrary, a breath of joyful confidence will raise our spirits. For a time, the whole group is pulled in the direction of individualism, then another period arrives and philanthropic social aspirations take over."

"Since each of us incarnates something of humanity, each individual consciousness contains something divine and thus finds itself marked with a character which renders it sacred and inviolable to others. Therein lies all individualism; and that is what makes it a necessary doctrine.”

"Individualism ... is the glorification not of the self but of the individual in general. It springs not from egoism but from sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for justice."

"In the same town ... occupations can coexist without being forced into a position where they harm one another, for they are pursuing different objectives. The soldier seeks military glory, the priest moral authority, the statesman power, the industrialist wealth, the scientist professional fame.”

"We should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it."

"We use the term 'crime' to designate any act which, regardless of degree, provokes against the perpetrator the characteristic reaction known as punishment."

"The only power that can serve to moderate individual egoism is that of the group; the only one that can serve to moderate the egoism of groups is that of another group that embraces them all."

"In any given society, every object of exchange has ... a fixed value that might be called its social value. It represents the amount of useful work intrinsic to it. By this must be understood not the total labor that it may have cost, but the part ... capable of producing socially useful effects."

"The task of the most advanced societies [is] a mission for justice... [we must] inject an even greater equity into our social relationships."

“A living cell consists entirely of inanimate, mineral molecules. But by the sheer fact of their combination the qualities characteristic of life emerge. ... Thus, it is an invariable fact that the whole may be something other than the sum of its parts.”

"If I do not conform to ordinary conventions, if in my mode of dress I pay no heed to what is customary in my country and in my social class, the laughter I provoke, the social distance at which I am kept, produce, although in a more mitigated form, the same results as any real penalty.”

"We use the word 'function' in preference to 'end' or 'goal' precisely because social phenomena generally do not exist for the usefulness of the results they produce. (1/2)

"Nothing is so vain and sterile as that scientific puritanism which, under the pretext that science is not fully established, counsels abstention and recommends to men that they stand by as indifferent witnesses, or at least resigned ones, at the march of events."

"As for the economists, though they formerly allowed themselves to be seduced by the simplicity of [their] theory, for some time they have sensed the necessity of tempering the rigor of their primitive orthodoxy and of opening themselves to more generous sentiments."

"The only remedy for the ill [of egoism] is to restore enough consistency to social groups for them to obtain a firmer grip on the individual, and for him to feel himself bound to them."

"Of course, a man does sometimes hope against all reason and, even if it is unreasonable, hope has its joys. So it may be that this sustains him for a time, but it cannot indefinitely survive the repeated disappointments of experience."

"When the hole that life has dug out of its own resources is filled, the animal is satisfied and asks for nothing more. . . . [Yet] human intelligence is more aware and can suggest better conditions which appear as desirable ends and inspire activity..."

“Wealth . . . by the powers that it confers, gives us the illusion that we depend only on ourselves. By lessening the resistance that things put in our way, it persuades us that they can be constantly overcome. And, the less one feels limited, the more intolerable any limitation becomes.”

“Beyond the pleasures that we have experienced, we imagine and yearn for others, and if one should happen to have more or less exhausted the realm of the possible, one dreams of the impossible – one thirsts for what is not.”

“The division of labour progresses the more individuals there are who are sufficiently in contact with one another to be able mutually to act and react upon one another….” 1/2

“Nothing is more false than the antimony that people have often wished to establish between the authority of rules and the freedom of the individual. Liberty (by which we mean a just liberty, one for which society is duty bound to enforce respect) is itself the product of a set of rules.”

“Is it not very remarkable that the fundamental cult of the most civilized religions is that of human suffering?”

“But is it true that the happiness of men increases in proportion as men progress? Nothing is more doubtful. There are certainly many pleasures open to us today that more simple natures are unaware of… 1/2

“Indeed any change in human existence, whether sudden or prepared in advance, always constitutes a painful crisis, for it does violence to acquired instincts, which offer it resistance. All the past holds us back, even when the brightest prospects tempt us to go forward.“

“We are therefore led to consider the division of labor in a new light. In this case, indeed, the economic services that it can render are insignificant compared with the moral effects that it produces, and its true function is to create between two or more people a feeling of solidarity.”

“It is because the division of labor is accompanied by an increase in fatigue that man is constrained to seek after, as a compensatory increase, those goods of civilization that otherwise would present no interest for him.”

“The states of collective consciousness are of a different nature from the states of the individual consciousness; they are representatives of another kind. The mentality of groups is not that of individuals: it has its own laws.”

“The living cell contains nothing save chemical particles, just as society is made up of nothing except individuals. Yet it is very clearly impossible for the characteristic phenomena of life to reside in atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen…”

“Every time a psychological explanation is offered for a social phenomenon, we may rest assured that explanation is false.”