C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Ingratitude
One ungrateful man does an injury to all who are in suffering.
Ingratitude is treason to mankind.
The wicked are always ungrateful.
Ingratitude is abhorred by God and man.
You love a nothing when you love an ingrate.
He that is ungrateful has no guilt but one; all other crimes may pass for virtues in him.
To be ungrateful is to be unnatural. The head may be thus guilty, not the heart.
Brutes leave ingratitude to man.
Earth produces nothing worse than an ungrateful man.
Ingratitude is monstrous; and for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude.
The animal with long ears, after having drunk, gives a kick to the bucket.
Ingratitude calls forth reproaches, as gratitude brings fresh kindnesses.
He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the evil that a man can be guilty of.
Ingratitude dries up the fountain of all goodness.
There is something noble in hearing myself ill spoken of when I am doing well.
Flints may be melted—we see it daily—but an ungrateful heart cannot; no, not by the strongest and the noblest flame.
Throw no stones into the well whence you have drunk.
How bitter it is to reap a harvest of evil for good that you have done.
Men may be ungrateful, but the human race is not so.
Ingratitude is the abridgment of all baseness,—a fault never found unattended with other viciousness.
He that forgets his friend is ungrateful to him; but he that forgets his Saviour is unmerciful to himself.
One great cause of our insensibility to the goodness of our Creator is the very extensiveness of His bounty.
We seldom find people ungrateful as long as we are in a condition to render them services.
Do you know what is more hard to bear than the reverses of fortune? It is the baseness, the hideous ingratitude, of man.
Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never seen that clever men have been ungrateful.
Ingratitude never so thoroughly pierces the human breast as when it proceeds from those in whose behalf we have been guilty of transgressions.
The worst of ingratitude lies not in the ossified heart of him who commits it, but we find it in the effect it produces on him against whom it was committed.
Man is, beyond dispute, the most excellent of created beings, and the vilest animal is a dog; but the sages agree that a grateful dog is better than an ungrateful man.
Everybody takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many go so far as to acknowledge moderate ones; but there is hardly any one who does not repay great obligations with ingratitude.
Ingratitude is a nail which, driven into the tree of courtesy, causes it to wither; it is a broken channel, by which the foundations of the affections are undermined; and a lump of soot, which, falling into the dish of friendship, destroys its scent and flavor.
The greatest evils in human society are such as no law can come at; as in the case of ingratitude, where the manner of obligation very often leaves the benefactor without means of demanding justice, though that very circumstance should be the more binding to the person who has received the benefit.
You may rest upon this as an unfailing truth, that there neither is, nor never was, any person remarkably ungrateful, who was not also insufferably proud. In a word, ingratitude is too base to return a kindness, too proud to regard it, much like the tops of mountains, barren indeed, but yet lofty; they produce nothing; they feed nobody; they clothe nobody; yet are high and stately, and look down upon all the world.