This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There be three usual causes of ingratitude upon a benefit received - envy, pride, and covetousness; envy, looking more at other's benefits than our own; pride, looking more at ourselves than at the benefit; covetousness, looking more at what we would have than at what we have." - Joseph Hall, fully Bishop Joseph Hall
"Charity is never lost: it may meet with ingratitude, or be of no service to those on whom it was bestowed, yet it ever does a work of beauty and grace upon the heart of the giver." - Thomas Middleton
"That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward." - Sydney Smith
"Better to expose ourselves to ingratitude than fail in assisting the unfortunate." - Du Coeur NULL
"Most people return small Favors, acknowledge middling ones, and repay great ones with Ingratitude." - Benjamin Franklin
"Almost everyone takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many are grateful for moderate ones; but there is scarcely anyone who has anything but ingratitude for great ones." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"An extraordinary haste to discharge an obligation, is sort of ingratitude." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Next to ingratitude, the most painful thing to bear is gratitude." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The ingratitude of the world can never deprive us of the conscious happiness of having acted with humanity ourselves." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Ingratitude is the abridgment of all baseness, a fault never found unattended with other viciousness." - Thomas Fuller
"The immemorial ingratitude of rulers and commonwealths is proverbial. Especially common is ingratitude to Israel — the People that has achieved so much of eternal worth, but has rarely succeeded in winning gratitude." - Joseph H. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz
"We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. Some have never truly loved anything but themselves - perhaps because their first outreachings were received with coldness and lack of sympathy and then love quickly turns putrid, and becomes greed, and lust, and turns even to self- disgust. Some confine their love to the narrow limits of the family, and then too love decays into sentimentality, or hardens into indifference. The couple that are wrapped up in themselves soon find the parcel uncomfortably tight; the mother who pours out her love on her child till both are smothered in a cocoon of sentiment soon tastes the bitter worm of ingratitude and ruins the very object of her love. There are few more depressing spectacles than the perennial “old grad,” who has never broken the bonds of collegiate enthusiasm or developed beyond the throaty lore of Alma Matriolatry. And the present day provides us with the awful spectacle of what an ingrown love of country can do, what fanatical hatreds and cruelties it can engender, and how again it can destroy the very object of its love." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
"There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence." - Lin Yutang
"The quickest cure for ingratitude is loss. " - Mike Murdock
"The mysterious manner in which this growing sense of unity commingles with a sense of utter goodness is worth noting. It arises by no effort of mine; rather does it come to me out of I know not where. Harmony appears gradually and flows through my whole being like music. An infinite tenderness takes possession of me, smoothing away the harsh cynicism which a reiterated experience of human ingratitude and human treachery has driven deeply into my temperament. I feel the fundamental benignity of Nature despite the apparent manifestation of ferocity. Like the sounds of every instrument in an orchestra that is in tune, all things and all people seem to drop into the sweet relationship that subsists within the Great Mother's own heart. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte
"There are three kinds of companions: some are like food, indispensable; some like medicine, good occasionally; and some like poison, unnecessary at any time." - Samuel ha-Nagid, born Samuel ibn Naghrela or Naghrillah
"A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander." - Walter Savage Landor