Quotes by Emile Durkheim

• Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.
• 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.
• Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
• Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.