Maniacal suicide. βThis is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Emile DurkheimRead
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
Interpretation
What this quote means
People often find reality unsatisfactory when compared to their imaginative dreams, leading them to neglect reality.
In this quote, Emile Durkheim highlights the tendency of individuals to abandon reality in favor of more appealing and idealistic visions created by their imagination. He suggests that when confronted with a reality that seems less exciting or fulfilling than the vivid dreams fueled by our desires and creativity, people may choose to disengage from the practicalities of life, seeking solace in their imaginative constructs instead. This reflects a common human struggle between accepting the limitations of the real world and yearning for the limitless possibilities envisioned in our minds.
Themes
RealityDreamsImaginationAbandonmentHuman Nature
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of facing reality instead of solely dreaming, this quote could be used to illustrate the point.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes βMan cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
Emile DurkheimRead
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Emile DurkheimRead
A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
Emile DurkheimRead
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
Emile DurkheimRead
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
Emile DurkheimRead
Similar quotes
Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.
Alan WattsRead
I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.
Margaret AtwoodRead
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan KunderaRead
I've always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence. It's the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one.
Clint EastwoodRead
Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.
Thomas BrowneRead
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead