Bestowing benefits

1 passages · search this phrase →

Often appears with: gratitude and ingratitude · temperance and self-mastery · repayment of benefits · duty, conscience, and obligation · character of aebutius liberalis

Usually: letter or document (1) · detachment (1) · exhortation (1)

Quotable

“You yourself are so far from any boastfulness, you are so eager at once to free those whom you serve from any feeling of obligation to you, that you like, when giving anything to any one, to seem not so much to be giving a present as returning one; and therefore what you give in this manner will all the more fully he repaid to you.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca, L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits · observation

L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits primary

Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 59-65 CE (approx.)
BOOK I. The prevalence of ingratitude--How a benefit ought to be bestowed--The three Graces--Benefits are the chief bond of human society--What we owe in return for a benefit received--A benefit consists not of a thing but of the wish to do good--Socrates and > BOOK V. (1/22)

Seneca tells Aebutius Liberalis that true benefits are given willingly and without seeking repayment, so even ungrateful recipients can be steadily made grateful through continued beneficence.

I. In the preceding books I seem to have accomplished the object which I proposed to myself, since in them I have discussed how a benefit ought to be bestowed, and how it ought to be received. These are the limits of this action; when I dwell upon it further I am not obeying the orders, but the caprices of my subject which ought to be followed whither it leads, not whither it allures us to wander; for now and then s…