good.

XV. Can we doubt that the converse of a benefit is an injury? As
the infliction of injuries is a thing to be avoided, so is the
bestowal of benefits to be desired for its own sake. In the former,
the disgrace of crime outweighs all the advantages which incite us
to commit it; while we are urged to the latter course by the
appearance of honour, in itself a powerful incentive to action,
which attends it.

I should not lie if I were to affirm that every one takes pleasure
in the benefits which he has bestowed, that everyone loves best to
see the man whom he has most largely benefited. Who does not thinks
that to have bestowed one benefit is a reason for bestowing a
second? and would this be so, if the act of giving did not itself
give us pleasure? How often you may hear a man say, "I cannot bear
to desert one whose life I have preserved, whom I have saved from
danger. True, he asks me to plead his cause against men of great
influence. I do not wish to do so, yet what am I to do? I have
already helped him once, nay twice." Do you not perceive how very
powerful this instinct must be, if it leads us to bestow benefits
first because it is right to do so, and afterwards because we have
already bestowed somewhat? Though at the outset a man may have had
no claim upon us, we yet continue to give to him because we have
already given to him. So untrue is it that we are urged to bestow
benefits by our own interest, that even when our benefits prove
failures we continue to nurse them and encourage them out of sheer
love of benefiting, which has a natural weakness even for what has
been ill-bestowed, like that which we feel for our vicious
children.