Favors

Favors or favours are acts by which help is voluntarily provided to another person out of goodwill, rather than in the interests of justice or for payment.

• Unwanted favours gain no gratitude.
  • Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus

• Let the favour be repaid to him who repays a favour.
  • Sumerian proverb, Collection XIII at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 267.

• Gratia, quæ tarda est, ingrata est: gratia namque
  Cum fieri properat, gratia grata magis.
  • A favor tardily bestowed is no favor; for a favor quickly granted is a more agreeable favor.
  • Ausonius, Epigrams, LXXXII. 1.

• Nam improbus est homo qui beneficium scit sumere et reddere nescit.
  • That man is worthless who knows how to receive a favor, but not how to return one.
  • Plautus, Persa, V, 1, 10.

• Nam quamblibet sæpe obligati, si quid unum neges, hoc solum meminerunt, quod negatum est.
  • For however often a man may receive an obligation from you, if you refuse a request, all former favors are effaced by this one denial.
  • Pliny the Younger, Epistles, III. 4.

• Beneficium accipere, libertatem est vendere.
  • To accept a favor is to sell one's freedom.
  • Syrus, Maxims.

• Neutiquam officium liberi esse hominis puto
  Cum is nihil promereat, postulare id gratiæ apponi sibi.
  • No free man will ask as favor, what he can not claim as reward.
  • Terence, Andria, II. 1. 32.

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