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It is always easier to requite an injury than a service: gratitude is a burden, but revenge is found to pay.

Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.

Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.

To find gratitude and generosity when you could reasonably find hurt and resentment will surprise you. It will be so surprising because you will see so much of the opposite: people who have much more than others yet who react with anger when one advantage is lost or with resentment when an added gift is denied.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

Virtuous people often revenge themselves for the constraints to which they submit by the boredom which they inspire.

When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.

Psychologically, it's always more pleasurable to blame others for our problems than it is to acknowledge our own responsibility.