The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Quotes

“It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“Anyone who has truly practiced a religion knows very well that it is [the set of regularly repeated actions that make up the cult] that stimulates the feelings of joy, inner peace, serenity, and enthusiasm that, for the faithful, stand as experimental proof of their beliefs. The cult is not merely a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly expressed; it is the sum total of means by which that faith is created and recreated periodically. Whether the cult consists of physical operations or mental ones, it is always the cult that is efficacious.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.”
― Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“It is true that we take it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“Society in general, simply by its effect on men's minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of the divine. A society is to its members what a god is to its faithful. A god is first of all a being that man conceives of as superior to himself in some respects and one on whom he believes he depends.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“it is a more or less complex system of myths, dogmas, rites and ceremonies.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“are found in America,”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“Hair has similar properties.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“Mythical powers, sometimes conceived under the form of animals, then intervened and made men out of these ambiguous and innumerable beings which Spencer and Gillen say represent “stages in the transformation of animals and plants into human beings.”[”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“Other Australian societies place at the beginning of humanity either strange animals from which the men were descended in some unknown way,[”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“In order to give a semblance of intelligibility to this duality, so strange for us, the primitive has invented myths which, it is true, explain nothing and only shift the difficulty, but which, by shifting it, seem at least to lessen the logical scandal.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“The representations of the totem are therefore more actively powerful than the totem itself.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“in any case, it is not applicable to totemism. Every member of the clan is invested with a sacred character which is not materially inferior to that which we just observed in the animal.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“in any case, it is not applicable to totemism. Every member of the clan is invested with a sacred character which is not materially inferior to that which we just observed in the animal. This”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“we are inclined to consider the common man, the simple believer, as an essentially profane being.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“The Arunta dance around the nurtunja, and assemble before the image of their totem to adore it, but a similar demonstration is never made before the totemic being itself.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“we arrive at the remarkable conclusion that the images of totemic beings are more sacred than the beings themselves.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“we arrive at the remarkable conclusion that the images of totemic beings are more sacred than the beings themselves. Also, in the ceremonies of the cult,”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“For example, when it is permitted to eat the plant or animal that serves as totem, it is not possible to do so freely; only a little bit may be taken at a time. To go beyond this amount is a ritual fault that has grave consequences.[”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“Sometimes the myth attempts to explain how, by a series of nearly natural events and a sort of spontaneous evolution, the animal transformed himself little by little, and finally took a human form.[”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“It is from his stay in this mythical land that he brought back the totemic emblem, together with the powers and virtues believed to be attached to it.[”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“So man also has something sacred about him.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“There is no religious ceremony where blood does not have some part to play.[”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“MacLennan was the first who undertook to attach totemism to the general history of humanity.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“there is something in man which holds profane things at a distance and which possesses a religious power; in other words, the human organism conceals within its depths a sacred principle, which visibly comes to the surface in certain determined cases.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“we substitute our European ideas for those which the primitive has of man and of society.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“the totemic emblem, the animal or plant whose appearance this emblem reproduces, and the members of the clan.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“All known things will thus be arranged in a sort of tableau or systematic classification embracing the whole of nature.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life