“He who receives a benefit with gratitude, repays the first installment of it.”
Qui grate beneficium accipit, primam eius pensionem solvit.
Seneca the Younger Moral Essays
De Beneficiis (On Benefits): Book 2, cap. 22, line 1.
Moral Essays
“The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire to receive even greater benefits.”
La reconnaissance de la plupart des hommes n'est qu'une secrète envie de recevoir de plus grands bienfaits.
Variant translation: Gratitude is the lively expectation of favours yet to come.
Maxim 298. Compare: "The gratitude of place-expectants is a lively sense of future favours", attributed to Sir Robert Walpole.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire to receive even greater benefits." by François de La Rochefoucauld?
François de La Rochefoucauld156
French author of maxims and memoirs 1613–1680Related quotes
Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer
What is Poverty? http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html (Spring 1999). <br class="br">City Journal (1998 - 2008)
“It is the nature of men to be bound by the benefits they confer as much as by those they receive.”
Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 10; translated by W. K. Marriot
Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)
Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 255
“Few men desire freedom, the greater part desire just masters.”
Namque pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt.
Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician
IV.69.18
Variant translation: Only a few prefer liberty, the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.
Histories
“Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.”
Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist
“That possession which we gain by the sword is not lasting; gratitude for benefits is eternal.”
Non est diuturna possessio in quam gladio ducimus; beneficiorum gratia sempiterna est.
Quintus Curtius Rufus Roman historian
VIII, 8, 11.
Historiarum Alexandri Magni Macedonis Libri Qui Supersunt, Book VIII
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
1920s, Marriage and Morals (1929)
Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) lieutenant-general in the British Army, writer, founder and Chief Scout of the Scout Movement
“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.”
Dan Brown book The Da Vinci Code
Source: The Da Vinci Code