Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

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.

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.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.