“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)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
François de La Rochefoucauld156
French author of maxims and memoirs 1613–1680Related quotes
“A dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.”
Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician
Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet
Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti
Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic
2010s, American Contempt for Liberty (2015)
“Whatever misanthropists may say, ingrates and the perverse are exceptions in the human species.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Henry Miller book Sexus
The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 14. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 339)
“Whatever things a man gives up,
By those he cannot suffer pain.”
Thiruvalluvar book Tirukkuṛaḷ
Verse XXXV.1
Tirukkural
“Every time that I fill a high office, I create a hundred discontented men and an ingrate.”
Louis XIV of France (1638–1715) King of France and Navarra, from 1643 to 1715
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
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
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!"
