33. "No one on either side of the family has ever gone through this," Mrs. Nicholson said, "and I guess I'm impatient. I know he is educated and has a great work ethic and wants to start contributing, and I don't know what to do. "

18. After I left home, I would always send Father and Mother a cheque at Christmas and urge them to indulge in a few luxuries for themselves. But they rarely did. When I came home a few days before Christmas, Father would tell me of the coal and groceries they had bought for some“widder woman”in town who had a lot of children and no money to buy food and fuel. What joy they got out of these gifts— the joy of giving without accepting anything whatever in return!

17. Does that sound like sheer, impractical, visionary idealism? It isn't. It is just horse sense. It is a good way for you and me to find the happiness we long for. I know. I have seen it happen right in my own family. My own mother and father gave for the joy of helping others. We were poor—always overwhelmed by debts. Yet, poor as we were, my father and mother always managed to send money every year to an orphans' home—the Christian Home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Mother and Father never visited that home. Probably no one thanked them for their gifts—except by letter—but they were richly repaid, for they had the joy of helping little children— without wishing for or expecting any gratitude in return.

16. There are thousands of women like her, women who are ill from “ingratitude”, loneliness, and neglect. They long to be loved; but the only way in this world that they can ever hope to be loved is to stop asking for it and to start pouring out love without hope of return.

15. What this woman really wants is love and attention. But she calls it“gratitude”. And she will never get gratitude or love, because she demands it. She thinks it's her due.

14. Is the heart attack real? Oh, yes. The doctors say she has“a nervous heart”, suffers from palpitations. But the doctors also say they can do nothing for her——her trouble is emotional.

13. Do the nieces come to see her? Oh, yes, now and then, out of a spirit of duty. But they dread these visits. They know they will have to sit and listen for hours to halfveiled reproaches. They will be treated to an endless litany of bitter complaints and self-pitying sighs. And when this woman can no longer bludgeon, browbeat, or bully her nieces into coming to see her, she has one of her “spells”. She develops a heart attack.

12. I know a woman in New York who is always complaining because she is lonely. Not one of her relatives wants to go near her—and no wonder. If you visit her, she will tell you for hours what she did for her nieces when they were children:she nursed them through the measles and the mumps and the whooping-cough ;she boarded them for years;she helped to send one of them through business school, and she made a home for the other until she got married.

11. Here is the first point I am trying to make in this chapter:It is natural for people to forget to be grateful;so, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of heartaches.

10. That's how it goes. Human nature has always been human nature--and it probably won't change in your lifetime. So why not accept it? Why not be as realistic about it as was old Marcus Aurelius, one of the wisest men who ever ruled the Roman Empire. He wrote in his diary one day: “I am going to meet people today who talk too much—people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won't be surprised or disturbed, for I couldn't imagine a world without such people.” That makes sense, doesn't it? If you and I go around grumbling about ingratitude, who is to blame? Is it human nature—or is it our ignorance of human nature? Let's not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don't get it, we won't be disturbed.

9. If you gave one of your relatives a million dollars, would you expect him to be grateful? Andrew Carnegie did just that. But if Andrew Carnegie had come back from the grave a little while later, he would have been shocked to find this relative cursing him! Why? Because Old Andy had left 365 million dollars to public charities—and had “cut him off with one measly million, ”as he put it.