Ingratitude

“ Needless to add that, again like you, my hand was ever open to all my comrades, so that I was said to have 'nothing of my own.' It is curious to consider that, at the hands of my playfellows, I never tasted ingratitude. Is ingratitude the attribute only of the full-grown man? Or is it a snare which this human nature casts about the feet of generous childhood, the better to despoil the prey when grown to be a richer prize! ”

“ What I have done was at the whisper of a higher monitor than man; and from Him alone—even if I could suppose myself worthy, which I do not—I hope for reward. He who is capable of ingratitude is incapable of any virtue. ”

“ For seldom does any flagrant instance of baseness or ingratitude befall us, but the reaction of the blow strikes at other hearts that we ignored till then, and sets the unsealed fountains of their sympathy and sense of outraged justice gushing towards us in a thousand acts of kindness and devotion. ”

“ Far more I think than any other crime do we hate ingratitude, and we blame those persons who have received benefits and are ungrateful to their benefactors. And the ungrateful man is not only he who repays a kindness with evil deeds or words, but also he who is silent and conceals a kindness and tries to consign it to oblivion and abolish gratitude. ”

“ Shall ingratitude to man be looked upon as the blackest of crimes, and not ingratitude to God? Shall an insult offered to a king be looked upon in the most offensive light, and yet no notice (be) taken when the King of kings is treated with indignity and disrespect? ”

“ I used to think that she was my compensation. I would say to myself, "A man can't have all blessings. How can you expect others, when you've got her?" And I would accuse myself of ingratitude for complaining of my unsuccess. ”

“ We may learn to estimate it more correctly, by considering the enormity of the vice of ingratitude. We feel a strong mixture of indignation and abhorrence towards a man who has traduced his benefactor; a friend who has injured a friend; or a child who has forsaken a parent. It is an ancient maxim that "if you have called a man ungrateful, you have said the worst, you cannot add to his baseness." In all ages of the world, and even among savage nations, ingratitude has been stamped with abhorrence. ”

“ But with a knowledge of this tendency, I still venture to say that, of all that concerns mankind, this subject has, perhaps, been the least treated of in regard to its significance. For once that unreasonable expectations of gratitude have been reproved, ingratitude has been denounced a thousand times; and the same may be said of inconstancy, unkindness in friendship, neglected merit and the like.
To begin with ingratitude. Human beings seldom have the demands upon each other which they imagine; and for what they have done they frequently ask an impossible return. ”

“ Ingratitude.
"Ingratitude," by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) , is an incisive thrust at a refined vice. It is a part of education to learn to be grateful.
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou are not so unkind
⁠As man's ingratitude ”

“ The love I bear my God, my King and country, hath so oft emboldened me in the worst of extreme dangers, that now honesty doth constrain me to presume thus far beyond myself, to present your Majesty this short discourse: if ingratitude be a deadly poison to all honest virtues, I must be guilty of that crime if I should omit any means to be thankful. ”

“ Those who feel disappointed at not being appreciated must console themselves by remembering that ingratitude is the way of the world, and with the consciousness of having done their duty by themselves and their side. ”

“ I hate ingratitude more in a man Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption Inhabits our frail blood. ”

“ Could ingratitude reach greater depths? Had [347] a bitterer cup than this ever been held to the lips of any minister of that Christ who alone had felt the extreme bitterness of ingratitude?
And yet he scarcely knew the half of what these toilers thought of him to-day. He had no conception of the strong resentment—resentment without cause that burned in their hearts against him. He had preached fairly enough indeed; but what had he actually done for them? He had declaimed against the power of capital, but capital had not loosened its grip on them by so much as the breadth of a hair. ”

“ Formal ingratitude consists in contempt for the benefit or the benefactor, as when the person favored disdains what has been done for him, and therefore omits to give thanks or commits some injury against the benefactor. ”

“ Detraction, hypocrisy, ingratitude are all scourged by proverbs, but one feels over and over again how very much the proverbial wisdom of our ancestors seemed to dwell on the darker side of things. One [252] may find a dozen adages that have ingratitude as their theme, but scarcely one that sings the praise of sweet thankfulness, and in like manner pretension, boasting, time-serving, self-interest have their attendant proverbs, while the praise of gentle modesty and sweet self-surrender finds little or no place. ”

“ It is common, I know, to talk of the ingratitude of inferiors and the thanklessness of mercy. Alas! there is enough in our own hearts to justify misgivings, and when we think how ingrate we are, we may look more with pity than bitterness upon the indifference with which so many receive favors, sometimes making their very constancy the plea of insolent demand. Nevertheless, mercy will not be without reward, and, in due season, will penetrate with its own spirit minds sadly blunted by harsh usage. ”

“ THE GOAT-FACE.
All the ill deeds that a man commits have some colour of excuse,—either contempt which provokes, necessity which compels, love which blinds, or anger which breaks the neck. But ingratitude is a thing that has no excuse, true or false, upon which it can fix; and it is therefore the worst of vices, since it dries up the fountain of compassion, extinguishes the fire of love, closes the road to benefits, and causes vexation and repentance to spring up in the heart of the ungrateful person ”

“ This is a painful story of a few years’ misadventure and wrecked fortune, and ingratitude to a man whose honour and integrity, in the face of misfortune, should at least have shielded him from insult. ”

“ Gratitude and ingratitude belong to those events which appear every moment in the moral world, and about which men can never agree among themselves. I usually distinguish between non-thankfulness, ingratitude, and aversion from gratitude. The former is innate with men, nay, created with them ”

“ To think of these without affection is ingratitude; to feel gratitude, and not testify it, is forgetfulness, a forgetfulness approaching to neglect. While we thus look around us in search of these benefactors, to whom we owe the homage of a grateful heart, can we forget Him who is the author of all our mercies ”

“ To tell a tale of ingratitude is to take on the aspect of a martyr to the defects of others, to get sympathy in an affliction. All of us are responsive to such ideas, however much we may resent them logically. ”

“ It requires the lapse of a certain latency period ere gratitude is converted to ingratitude. In the beginning the feeling of gratitude reigns supreme. Slowly it grows fainter and fainter, is inaudible for a time, then on suitable occasions is heard again but ever more faintly. After a while, quite unawares, ingratitude has taken its place. All those pleasurable emotions that have accompanied gratitude have been transformed into their opposites: love into hatred, attraction into aversion, interest into indifference, praise into censure, and friendship into hostility. ”

“ Bitter as ingratitude will ever seem, all its poignancy is nothing compared to the smart it inflicts when practised towards those who have gone from us forever; we feel then as though treachery had been added to the wrong. ”

“ How does such language and ingratitude make the benefactor of that person feel? Why, his heart sinks within him. I can find thousands of just such men and women in this territory. When they are brought to this place, they do not know their benefactors, who saved them from death, but they are a head and shoulders above them, when they meet them in the streets.
Do you know the conclusion that is natural to man, when he is treated in such a manner by his fellow man? ”

“ Shamelessness, they hold, treads close on the heels of ingratitude, and thus ingratitude is the ringleader and chief instigator to every kind of baseness. ”

“ And as among the virtues, gratitude is in my judgment most especially to be commended, and ingratitude in equal measure to be censured, therefore, that I show myself not ungrateful, I have resolved, now that I may call myself to endeavour, in return for what I have received, to afford, so far as in me lies, some solace, if not to those who succoured and who, perchance, by reason of their good sense or good fortune, need it not, at least to such as may be apt to receive it. ”

“ Gratitude—I do not know of any, excepting the unpardonable sin, that is greater than the sin of ingratitude. ”

“ We subdue the strongest of creatures and overtake the fleetest—we reclaim the fiercest and outwit the craftiest. We are within one degree of heaven itself, and yet we are not satisfied.
Since there is not any one creature which we had rather be, we take it ill that we cannot draw the united excellencies of all other creatures into ourselves. Why are we not rather thankful to that goodness which has subjected the whole creation to our use and service?
The principal causes of ingratitude are pride and self-conceit, avarice, envy, etc. ”

“ But we, while recognising the duty of thankfulness, maintain that we show no ingratitude by refusing to give thanks to beings who do us no good, but who rather set themselves against us when we neither sacrifice to them nor worship them. ”

“ Ingratitude is monstrous: and for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude; of the which we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members. ”

“ It is certain, that the vice of ingratitude is one of the most common and most vulgarised in all the world; but with all this, you will not find any man who does not take pains to justify himself on this head; and I say the same of lying, of perfidy, and of other vices. ”

“ Must grief and ingratitude inevitably find entrance into the heart, in proportion to the loftiness and number of our mental endowments? Are we to seek for happiness in ignorance? To these questions the reply is obvious. ”

“ If to have prayed night and day that she who would have blessed my lonely and toilsome life may give some charm to his, not bestowed by his wealth and his greatness—if that were ingratitude, I am ungrateful ”

“ Now, there is in my opinion no one less to be admired than an ungrateful person. One might surely be pardoned for thinking that ingratitude ranks as a great sin in the sight of Heaven. But we are not to judge, far less condemn. ”

“ I ought to speak less to you of your misfortunes and of my sufferings. We [Pg 39] tarnish the lustre of our most beautiful actions when we applaud them ourselves. This is true, and yet there is a time when we may with decency commend ourselves; when we have to do with those whom base ingratitude has stupefied we cannot too much praise our own actions. ”

“ Wherefore ingratitude is properly denominated from being a deficiency of gratitude. Now every deficiency or privation takes its species from the opposite habit: for blindness and deafness differ according to the difference of sight and hearing. Therefore just as gratitude or thankfulness is one special virtue, so also is ingratitude one special sin. ”

“ But if ingratitude is a genuinely (psychologically) established fact then we must be able to determine the dark forces that have it in them to suppress the elementary feeling of gratitude. For even to the most casual observation it is apparent that the first emotion with which we react to a kindness is a warm feeling of recognition, gratitude. ”

“ As there are several sorts of ungrateful men, so there must be several ways of dealing with them, either by artifice, counsel, admonition, or reproof, according to the humor of the person, and the degree of the offence: provided always, that as well in the reminding a man of a benefit, as in the bestowing of it, the good of the receiver be the principal thing intended. There is a curable ingratitude, and an incurable; there is a slothful, a neglectful, a proud, a dissembling, a disclaiming, a heedless, a forgetful, and a malicious ingratitude ”

“ There is in every breast a sensibility to marks of honor, of favor, of esteem, and of confidence, which, apart from all considerations of interest, is some pledge for grateful and benevolent returns. Ingratitude is a common topic of declamation against human nature ”

“ To yield now, and return home to be tortured and despoiled of the little all, which your own good sense and your own good conduct have procured you—for, apart from good sense and good conduct, there is no such thing in the world as good fortune—would not only be positive insanity, but positive ingratitude to the Giver of all good. ”

“ The ingratitude of the world can never deprive us of the conscious happiness of having acted with humanity ourselves. ”

“ But, even granting that no new degree of enormity should be specially attached to the great by the scandal inseparable from their sins, ingratitude, which forms the second character of them, would be amply sufficient to attract, upon their heads, that neglect of God by which his bowels are for ever shut to compassion and clemency. ”

“ Percy, when he talked so sacredly of his affianced, and this never left me. How much I have to thank him for the good influence he made upon my whole life. I try to keep my heart grateful and ever mindful of the favors I receive from others. It seems to me that one of the great sins of humanity is ingratitude. It may possibly appear greater than it really is, because people take so little pains to show their gratitude. ”