Gabriel Tarde Quotes
Jean-Gabriel de Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social philosopher, and the chief rival of Emile Durkheim in the foundation of French sociology. After two decades as a magistrate in the Dordogne, he was appointed to the chair of modern philosophy at the College de France. The quotes below are attributed to Gabriel Tarde, organized by topic.
Browse Gabriel Tarde by topic
Gabriel Tarde on Death
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“The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation.”
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Gabriel Tarde on God
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“The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.”
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Gabriel Tarde on Knowledge
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“Being is - or should be - necessary.”
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“When the pessimist Besme says in La Ville that nothing is, he means precisely this, that there is no experience that withstands the analytical test.”
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“No doubt I shall be told: "In the immense majority of cases this is an illusion." But it is of the essence of hope to exlclude the consideration of cases; moreover, it can be shown that there exists an ascedning dialectic of hope, whereby hope rises to a plane which transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof - the plane of salvation as opposed to that of success in whatever form”
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“speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride.”
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Gabriel Tarde on Life
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“Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise.”
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“the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope.”
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Gabriel Tarde on Mind
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“Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it.”
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“I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical.”
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Gabriel Tarde on Politics
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Society is imitation, and imitation is a kind of somnambulism.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Every social phenomenon is the product of imitation, opposition, or adaptation.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“The social is the inter-mental.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Innovation is the source of all real social change.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“The crowd is the social body in its inferior state; the public, in its superior.”