A Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Theodore Dalrymple

Quote Topics

Alone Benefit Every Good Good Man Good Manners Gratitude Manners Place Received Right

Quote Author

Theodore Dalrymple
English - Writer
Born: October 11, 1949

gratitude, n. A sentiment lying midway between a benefit received and a benefit expected.

Ambrose Bierce

He who has conferred a benefit on anyone from motives of love or honor will feel pain, if he sees that the benefit is received without gratitude.

Aristotle

Command that no one be received, or kept to be of your household indoors or without, if one has not reasonable belief of them that they are faithful, discreet, and painstaking in the office for which they are received, and withal honest and of good manners.

Robert Grosseteste

Gratitude is a virtue disposing the mind to an inward sense and an outward acknowledgment of a benefit received, together with a readiness to return the same, or the like, as occasions of the doer of it shall require, and the abilities of the receiver extend to. He who receives a good turn, should never forget it: he who does one, should never remember it.

Pierre Charron

Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began.

Larry McMurtry

A prayerful life is the key to possessing gratitude. We often take for granted the people who most deserve our gratitude. Let us not wait until it is too late for us to express our gratitude. Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. If I gratitude be numbered among the serious sins, then gratitude takes its place among the noblest of virtues. To express gratitude is gracious and honorable, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live with gratitude ever in our hearts is to touch heaven.

Thomas S. Monson

Can we walk that thin line between constant change and continuation? And in the middle of this flux, feel gratitude but not hold on? Gratitude greases the joints to let us let go, and at the same time to stop and realize we received something. Gratitude is the most developed and mature of human emotions.

Natalie Goldberg

Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

Henri Nouwen

We never had it so good: Every person alive today derives great benefit from comforts and pleasures that were not available in the past. All of the latest technological advances serve us to a remarkable degree. For all this we should be full of appreciation and gratitude.

Zelig Pliskin

Laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and conditions of the people whom they are meant to benefit, and not imposed upon them according to the simple rule of right.

Edmund Spenser

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

George Bernard Shaw

To make a pleasant and friendly impression is not alone good manners, but equally good business.

Emily Post

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Judging others’ intentions is the right of God alone. We don’t have this right, and it is poor manners with God.

Habib Ali al-Jifri

... women of the North, I ask you to rise up with earnest, honest purpose, and go forward in the way of right, fearlessly, as independent human beings, responsible to God alone for the discharge of every duty, for the faithful use of every gift, the good Father has given you. Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world will say, whether you are in your place or out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, do your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.