43. He joined one of those companies -- owned by the family of his friend — and he has stayed in manufacturing,particularly at companies that make hand tools. Early on,he and his wife bought the home in which they raised their sons,a white colonialdating from the early 1800s,like many houses on North Street,where thegrandparents also live , a few doors away.

8. And when it comes to money matters! Well, that is even more hopeless. Charles Schwab told me that he had once saved a bank cashier who had speculated in the stock market with funds belonging to the bank. Schwab put up the money to save this man from going to the penitentiary. Was the cashier grateful? Oh, yes, for a little while. Then he turned against Schwab and reviled him and denounced him ---the very man who had kept him out of jail!

7. Christ healed ten lepers in one afternoon—but how many of those lepers even stopped to thank Him? Only one. Look it up in Saint Luke. When Christ turned around to His disciples and asked:“Where are the other nine?”they had all run away. Disappeared without thanks!Let me ask you a question:Why should you and I —or this business man in Texas—expect more thanks for our small favors than was given Jesus Christ?

6. If you saved a man's life, would you expect him to be grateful? You might—but Samuel Leibowitz, who was a famous criminal lawyer before he became a judge, saved seventy-eight men from going to the electric chair! How many of these men, do you suppose, stopped to thank Samuel Leibowitz, or ever took the trouble to send him a Christmas card? How many? Guess....That's right—none.

5. Here is the point I am trying to make:this man made the human and distressing mistake of expecting gratitude. He just didn't know human nature.

4. On the other hand, maybe the employees were selfish, mean, and ill-mannered. Maybe this. Maybe that. I Don't know any more about it than you do. But I do know what Dr. Samuel Johnson said :“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation. You do not find it among gross people.”

3. Instead of wallowing in resentment and self-pity, he might have asked himself why he didn't get any appreciation. Maybe he had underpaid and overworked his employees. Maybe they considered a Christmas bonus not a gift, but something they had earned. Maybe he was so critical and unapproachable that no one or cared to thank him. Maybe they felt he gave the bonus because most of the profits were going for taxes, anyway.

2.“An angry man, ”said Confucius, “is always full of poison.”This man was so full of poison that I honestly pitied him. He was about sixty years old. Now, life-insurance companies figure that, on the average, we will live slightly more than two-thirds of the difference between our present age and eighty. So this man—if he was lucky— probably had about fourteen or fifteen years to live. Yet he had already wasted almost one of his few remaining years by his bitterness and resentment over an event that was past and gone. I pitied him.

1.I recently met a business man in Texas who was burned up with indignation. I was warned that he would tell me about it within fifteen minutes after I met him. He did. The incident he was angry about had occurred eleven months previously, but he was still burned up about it. He couldn't speak of anything else. He had given his thirtyfour employees ten thousand dollars in Christmas bonuses—approximately three hundred dollars each—and no one had thanked him.“I am sorry, ”he complained bitterly, “that I ever gave them a penny!”