Gratitude
idea · 2 works · 6 mentions · 9 anchored passages
gratitude · a grateful mind · grateful · being grateful · grateful mind · owing benefits · returning gratitude · returning thanks · to return gratitude · ungrateful
in the texts
On Benefits
The virtue of properly acknowledging and repaying benefits received
but he who presses on, and heaps new ones upon the old, draws out gratitude even from a hard and forgetful heart.
1 That you may know that the disposition of a grateful mind is to be sought for its own sake, to be ungrateful is a thing to be shunned for its own sake, since nothing so much sunders and tears apart the concord of the human race as this vice.
For if it is base to be conquered in benefits, one ought not to receive a benefit from very powerful men, to whom you cannot return gratitude, from princes, I mean, from kings, whom fortune has placed in such a position that from it they can bestow many things, but receive few and unequal to what was given.
Letters to Lucilius
The virtue of acknowledging and repaying benefits received, contrasted with the ingratitude of ambition and desire.
But whoever thinks about receiving has forgotten what he has received;
To the sun and moon I owe very much, and they do not rise for me alone.
And not ambition only is unstable, but every desire, because it always begins from its end.