premise: The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a forgiver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves (hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for a gift); but not from anyone who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat that we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it. He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart and see that I love his commodity, and not him. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore, when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathise with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord, Timon. For, the expectation of gratitude is mean and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person.
hypothesis: The author of this passage does not like to receive gifts.