“It is not a pain to give to ingrates, but it is an intolerable one to be obliged to a dishonest man.”
Ce n'est pas un grand malheur d'obliger des ingrats, mais c'en est un insupportable d'être obligé à un malhonnête homme.
Variant translation: It is not a great misfortune to be of service to ingrates, but it is an intolerable one to be obliged to a dishonest man.
Maxim 317.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Original
Ce n'est pas un grand malheur d'obliger des ingrats, mais c'en est un insupportable d'être obligé à un malhonnête homme.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
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François de La Rochefoucauld 156
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Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents et un ingrat.
Quoted in Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), ch.26
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Context: "No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;—perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send not him!"
