Hermann Hesse Quotes

Morality is a social necessity

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

I conduct my life with an expectation that people will do the right thing. Yet even with all my experience, I am still surprised when they do not.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice; he is a moralist because he is a man.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

The beast in us must be[78] wheedled: ethic is necessary, that we may not be torn to pieces.

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.