"Self-complacent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that repays us ten thousand times over, for all that it has cost us, and makes us grateful to God, and our American patrons, for the happy change which has taken place in our situation. We are not so self-complacent as to rest satisfied with our improvement either as regards our minds or our circumstances. We do not expect to remain stationary,—far from it; but we certainly feel ourselves, for the first time, in a state to improve either to any purpose. The burden ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... mind," continued Challenger—"I put it in the third person rather than appear to be too self-complacent—the ideal scientific mind should be capable of thinking out a point of abstract knowledge in the interval between its owner falling from a balloon and reaching the earth. Men of this strong fibre are needed to form the conquerors of nature ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... formidable. A partiality for their ancient customs, an attachment to their Noblesse, and a deference for their Priests, are said to characterize the brave and simple natives of La Vendee. Hence republican writers, with self-complacent decision, always treat this war as the effect of ignorance, slavery, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... is faith, is self-distrust. 'I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.' Rivers do not run on the mountain tops, but down in the valleys. So the heart that is lifted up and self-complacent has no dew of His blessing resting upon it, but has the curse of Gilboa adhering to its barrenness; but the low lands, the humble and the lowly hearts, are they in which the waters that go softly scoop their course and diffuse their blessings. Faith ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... surly and as disrespectful in his behaviour to her as usual; but she did not observe, or she did not feel his morose temper as heretofore—he seemed amiable, mild, and gentle; at least this was the happy medium through which her self-complacent mind began to see him; for good humour, like the jaundice, makes every one of ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... and in good spirits, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field in that happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds. He sat motionless, looking at the heights visible above the mist, and his cold face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love. The marshals stood behind him not venturing to distract his attention. He looked now at the Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the General's hand, and the voluntary betrayal of his line of defence. He filed away the note among the papers relating to the case, took his hat, walked across the street, rang the bell, and sent up his card to Mr. Belcher. That self-complacent gentleman had not expected this visit, although he had suggested it. Instead, therefore, of inviting Mr. Balfour to his library, he went down to the drawing-room, where he found his visitor, quietly sitting with his hat in his hand. The most formal of courtesies opened the conversation, and Mr. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... style of philosophizing maybe (especially when self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with a gift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience. The writer of these pages has been forced in the past few years to this admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to facts of the sort dear ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... two degrees of pride—one, wherein a man is self-complacent; the other, wherein he is unable to accept himself. Of these two degrees, the second is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... a German porter appeared to whom Winn felt an instant simple antagonism. He was a self-complacent man, and he ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... for the world do anything to hurt her feelings," continued Lottie with the self-complacent righteousness of a deacon telling the congregation how good "grace" has made him. Her prominent commonplace brown eyes were gazing up the walk, an expression distressingly like envious anger in them. She had a thick, pudgy face, an oily skin, an outcropping of dull red pimples ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... This self-complacent soliloquy was cut short by the appearance of her brother, who carried a case of surgical instruments in ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... hardy race, reared on the hills, and disciplined in the straitest of creeds. Stolid and self-complacent, theirs was an unquestioning faith, accepting, as they did, the Divine decrees as a Mohamedan accepts his fate. What was, was right—all as it should be; elect, or non-elect, according to the fore-knowledge, it was well. Sucking ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... rose. He was naturally so self-complacent as to be seldom disposed to anger, but its rarity was not ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... Jauntily self-complacent, as confident of himself as if Rome were burning and he the garlanded fiddler, Seward braced himself for the task ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the tie of relationship secured him from attack on the part of the only power which he had need to fear, Croesus had for some years given himself up to the enjoyment of his gains and to an ostentatious display of his magnificence. It was a rude shock to the indolent and self-complacent dreams of a sanguine optimism, which looked that "to-morrow should be as to-day, only much more abundant," when tidings came that revolution had raised its head in the far south-east, and that an energetic prince, in the full vigor of life, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... 'Rimini,' and the still more facetious instances of his harmony and sublimity in the verses themselves; and they will recollect above all the contempt of Pope, Johnson, and such like poetasters and pseudo-critics, which so forcibly contrasted itself with Mr. Leigh Hunt's self-complacent approbation of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... is no true and substantial happiness but for the self-complacent. "The good man," as Solomon says, "is satisfied from himself." The reflex act is inseparable from the constitution of the human mind. How can any one have genuine happiness, unless in proportion as he looks round, and, "behold! every thing is very good?" This is the sunshine of the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... is the most arrogant, self-opinionated, self-complacent, vapid piece of humanity in this town or any other town. She irritates me to the point of impoliteness. She never sees that people don't want her. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... is not serious? Yesterday you had all the air of a man successful in his suit. You would be wrong to doubt it; and yet, if this assurance robbed you of the charming simplicity which sprang from uncertainty, I should blame you severely. I would have you neither bashful nor self-complacent; I would not have you in terror of losing my affection—that would be an insult—but neither would I have you wear your love lightly as a thing of course. Never should your heart be freer than mine. If you know nothing ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the reality and extent of the corruption brought about by sin, than man's ignorance of it. There is no more tragical proof that a man is 'wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked' than his vehement affirmation, 'I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing,' and his self-complacent rejection of the counsel to 'buy refined gold, and white garments, and eye-salve to anoint his eyes.' So obstinately unconscious are we of our ruin that even God's voice, whether uttered in definite words, or speaking in sharp sorrows and punitive acts, but too often fails to pierce the thick ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... in astonishment and disgust combined. The man's usual smiling, self-complacent manner had disappeared, and he now seemed a prey to emotion, his face alternately paling and flushing with excitement, and Barry saw that his whole frame was trembling. By the time the boats came alongside the brig, however, he was restored to his ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... bravado and reckless good-nature to increase the laughter which satirists had raised against him. However this may be, his conduct drew upon him blows that would have ruffled the composure of any less self-complacent or less amiable man. The Tory prints habitually spoke of him as Counsellor Ego whilst he was at the bar; and when it was known that he had accepted the seals, the opposition journals announced that he would enter the house as "Baron Ego, of Eye, in the county of Suffolk." Another of his ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... well as that of the "Industrious and Idle 'Prentices" are complete stories, worked out to their denoument— tragedies, one might say, written with a burlesque pencil, of eighteenth-century life. And if the note struck seem sometimes too insistent, if the Industrious one be too sleek, too self-complacent, the prodigal too immersed in sensual folly and indulgence; if the blacks seem too black, and the whites too white, and those half-tones which accord the values of life be generally missing; if a more refined age demands ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... the individual was shared in greater or less degree by all whose lives were opposed to the Divine order, and that pride, luxury, and avarice in one class gave motive and temptation to the grosser forms of evil in another. How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes of self-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of all its decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned with Pharisaical harshness! In his Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind be dwells with great earnestness ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in all that of favouritism. The declaration that there are people who have a special relationship to the divine heart may be so stated as to have a very ugly look, and it often has been so stated as to be nothing more than self-complacent Pharisaism, which values a privilege principally because its possession is an insult to somebody else ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... them. First of all comes Mr. George Kirkpatrick, who was admired by William, the sleek, neat waiter (who had a music-master to teach him the flageolet two hours every morning before the maids were up), for his temper in managing an argument. Mr. Kirkpatrick was one of those bland, simpering, self-complacent men, who, unshakable from the high tower of their own self-satisfaction, look down upon your arguments from their magnificent elevation. 'I will explain,' was his condescending phrase. If you corrected the intolerable magnifico, he corrected your correction; if you hinted at an ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Holy Ghost begets a spirit of unity among Christians. People who have been sitting behind their sectarian fences in self-complacent ease, or proud indifference, or proselytising zeal, or grim defiance, are suddenly lifted above the fence, and find sweet fellowship with each other, when He ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... realized what she had done, but it was useless to go on acting after the self-betrayal of that moment's agitation, and even Rowlett's self-complacent egotism read the whole truth of its meaning. He read it and knew with a fullness of conviction that through the whole episode she had been leading him on as a hunter decoys game and that her slow and grudging conversion was no conversion ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... go. Gaed, gaid, went. Gallard, frightened. Gane, gone. Gang, go. Gar, make. Gart, made. Gash, shrewd, self-complacent. Gat, got. Gate, way. Gaun, gawn, going. Gawsie, buxom, jolly. Gear, things, goods. Geck, mock. Ghaist, ghost. Ghastness, ghastliness. Gibbet-airn, gibbet-iron. Gie, gi'e, give. Gie's, give us, give me. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... other than Nehemiah, who was given this second name because he was born in Babylon. (26) Richly endowed as Zerubbabel-Nehemiah was with admirable qualities, he yet did not lack faults. He was excessively self-complacent, and he did not hesitate to fasten a stigma publicly upon his predecessors in the office of governor in the land of Judah, among whom was so excellent a man as Daniel. To punish him for these transgressions, the Book of Ezra does ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... I would help him to understand Coleridge and tell him about Dryden's essays and Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and I would assure him, too, it was not I who wrote that unfortunate review of Conrad that gets such an exemplary drubbing at his hands for its self-complacent imbecility. He ought to know that, or he will think that I speak out of malice. He says that England has need of a literary critic. I agree. And I agree that this critic must not be of that professorial breed with which he deals so faithfully, not ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... which on every side met the several departments of the executive branch of the Government one must suppose were but little appreciated by many, whose opportunities for exact observation were the best, as one often meets with self-complacent expressions as to modes of achieving readily what prompt, patient, zealous effort proved to be insurmountable. In the progress of this work, it is hoped, will be presented not only the magnitude of the obstacles, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... conceal the chagrin of discomfiture, laughs at the promises of a virtuous love, calls himself a gay deceiver, great monster, and is once more self-complacent. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... controversial commentary; but I may observe in passing that the original of Simplicius Faber in "What you Will" must surely have been the same hanger-on or sycophant of Ben Jonson's who was caricatured by Dekker in his "Satiromastix" under the name of Asinius Bubo. The gross assurance of self-complacent duncery, the apish arrogance and imitative dogmatism of reflected self-importance and authority at second hand, are presented in either case with such identity of tone and coloring that we can hardly imagine the satire to have been equally applicable to two contemporary satellites ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in which she gave a little festa to her neighbours; and I ascertained she did remember them. She even hinted to one of her guests, in my hearing, that they had been intended for her originally; but "we cannot command the impulses of the heart, you know, cara mia," she added, with a very self-complacent sort of a sigh. ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... know as I did. They was mostly pooty 'commodatin'," said Seth, drawing the back of his brown hand across his mouth to hide a self-complacent grin at the recollection of ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... gives him a friendly word or smile is disposed to throw herself into his arms—would no doubt have surmised her secret before; but although Van Berg was intensely proud, as we have seen, and had been rendered self-complacent and self-confident by the circumstances of his lot, he had none of this contemptible vanity. The discovery of Ida's love caused him far greater surprise than when he recognized his own, and it was a source of deep satisfaction to him that this modern and conventional Undine ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... apparently a poor fisherman. He was small, dried-up and weather-beaten, and wore a thin, threadbare coat. One could see that he was so used to being out in all sorts of weather that he didn't mind the cold. The other was well fed and well dressed, and looked like a prosperous and self-complacent farmer. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... grasp his standpoint, nevertheless enjoyed, especially while their own oracles were dumb, the sound of the heavy guns which, after his return to Parliament, from time to time poured political shot and shell into the ranks of the self-complacent representatives of the party opposite. In those ranks, too, there were men who at heart agreed very largely with the speaker, while compelled by party discipline to maintain silence. On the other hand, there nearly always came a moment when Conservative approval passed into the opposite, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... disillusion itself. The Gray Seal was Stace Morse—and Stace Morse was of the dregs of the city's scum, a pariah, an outcast, with no single redeeming trait to lift him from the ruck of mire and slime that had strewn his life from infancy. The face of Inspector Clayton, blandly self-complacent, leaped out from the paper to meet Jimmie Dale's eyes—and with it a column and a ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... north and south, and mechanically prodded the ground with his walking-stick. A closer glance at his face corroborated the testimony of his clothes. It was self-complacent, yet there was small apparent ground for such complacence. Nothing irradiated it; to the eye of the magician in character, if not to the ordinary observer, the expression enthroned there was absolute submission to and belief in a little ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half- pitying contempt for me—seen not in the ordinary indications of intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious mind is on the watch for, but in all their ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... theft, to come into the Lord's treasury. And, when the warm desires of our hearts, on these points, shall be realized, the fifty thousand Southerners, who annually visit the North, for purposes of business and pleasure, will not all return to their homes, self-complacent and exulting, as now, when they carry with them the suffrages of the North in favor of slavery: but numbers of them will return to pursue the thoughts inspired by their travels amongst the enemies of oppression—and, in the sequel, they will let ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... But even in the First Part, the happy issue is involved in the terms of Faust's compact with the devil. Only on the condition that Mephistopheles shall be able to satisfy Faust and cheat him "into self-complacent pride, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... for power and leadership? Are you given to ostentation and self-praise? Or have you given up the love of riches? Have you relinquished all strife? Are you content to take the lowest place, and to be passed by unnoticed? And have you ceased to talk about yourself and to regard yourself with self-complacent pride? If the former, even though you may imagine you worship God, the god of your heart is self. If the latter, even though you may withhold your lips from worship, you are dwelling with the ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... a garb like this? Needs he the tragic fur, the smoke of lamps, The pent-up breath of an unsavoury throng To thaw him into feeling, or the smart And snappish dialogue that flippant wits Call comedy, to prompt him with a smile? The self-complacent actor, when he views (Stealing a sidelong glance at a full house) The slope of faces from the floor to the roof, As if one master-spring controlled them all, Relaxed into an universal grin, Sees not a countenance there that speaks a joy Half so refined or so ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... was due to a very complex system of causes. The English have always been the most self-complacent of peoples, and 1851 was perhaps the one year in the whole of our history when this little weakness reached its climax. The Oxford Movement, with Newman and Ward as its prophets, had been succeeded by the Manchester ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... and learned its language at her nurse's knee. But, though familiar with art, she was not prepared for the behaviour of the artist. Ted treated his works as if he were the last person concerned with them. He would pass scathing judgment on those which pleased Audrey best; or he would stand, like a self-complacent deity, aloof from his own creations, beholding them to be very good, and ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... drew her wrap about her shoulders, and Miss Meredith turned towards her. The expression Robinette had noticed passed from the high-coloured face and left it as before, self-complacent and slightly patronizing. "You seem to feel cold," she said. "I never do; which is rather unfortunate, as I'm just ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prone to think that the hospitals of Chauliac's time would not be suitable for such surgical work as he describes. It is, however, only another amusing assumption of this self-complacent age of ours to think that we were the first who ever made hospitals worthy of the name and of the great humanitarian purpose they subserve. As a matter of fact, the old-time hospitals were even ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... year from Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, devotees and sceptics, wondering foreigners and self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they pronounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... very noble in the elevated manner in which the self-complacent triumph of genius, expressed by so many poets from Ennius downwards, is at once justified and chastened by the reflection in these lines. We see in them that the poet alludes to himself in the third person, and he repeats this style in the 'Elegy,' where, after the fourth line, the first personal ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... endure that sort of mouth. It looks so self-complacent, as if it knew its own beauty—the curves are too immovable. I like a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... presence of deities, and in the company of her son, Caesarion, her face, which is in profile, should have nothing of Hathor's sad impressiveness. This, no doubt, is not the real Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face suggests a certain self-complacent cruelty and sensuality essentially human, and utterly detached from all divinity, whereas in the face of the goddess there is a something remote, and even distantly intellectual, which calls the imagination to "the ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... and good-natured, even playful, down to the last, is my policy; to hint at my resources without bullying and menace will be good taste. The Ante-Room, the Abomination of Desolation. Enter Mr Howe at last, Earl Grey and Mr Hawes looking very grim and self-complacent. Two to one is long odds. But here goes at you: "Ye cogging Greeks, have at ye both." The interview lasted two hours. What passed may be guessed by the result. When I entered the room, my all trembled in the ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... that his way was smooth before him, and that he need not give himself a moment's trouble about the ending. And though, as a rule, a man likes the excitement of doubt and the sentiment of difficulties to be overcome, still there are times when, if he is either very weary or too self-complacent to care to strive, he is glad to be assured that he has won before he has wooed, and has only to claim the love that is waiting for him. Which was what Mr. Dundas felt now when he noted the simplicity with which Josephine showed her heart while believing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... and sentiments. The selection "Excerpts from the Journal of a West India Slave Owner" is a convincing exhibit of the way in which attitudes of superordination and subordination may find expression in the sentiments of a conscientious and self-complacent paternalism on the part of the master and of an ingratiating and reverential loyalty on the part of the slave. In a like manner the selection from the "Memories of an Old Servant" indicates the natural way in which sentiments of subordination which have grown up in conformity with ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... water-color. They were in different key, they had a different timbre. How could she tell him what indeed already began to puzzle herself, why she had borrowed that money at all? The plain fact was that she had grabbed a bait. She had grabbed! She became less and less attentive to his meditative, self-complacent fragments of talk as she told herself this. Her secret thoughts made some hasty, half-hearted excursions into the possibility of telling the thing in romantic tones—Ramage was as a black villain, she as a white, fantastically white, maiden.... She doubted ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... from making India the term of his labors. No shadow of his coming troubles seems to have flitted before the eyes of the Emperor during the weeks that he was thus occupied—weeks which he passed in self-complacent contemplation of the past and dreams of an ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... confusion. Rarely had Casanova encountered such freedom of thought in women; never had he met with anything of the kind in a girl who was certainly not yet twenty years old. It was painful to him to remember that in earlier and better days his own mind had with deliberate, self-complacent boldness moved along the paths whereon Marcolina was now advancing—although in her case there did not seem to exist any consciousness of exceptional courage. Fascinated by the uniqueness of her methods of thought and expression, he almost forgot that he was walking ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... evening in the camp at Rosny by Henry IV. himself, and at once sent off to some of his principal partisans who were absent, amongst others to M. de la Verune, governor of Caen. We will content ourselves here with the king's own words, striking in their precision, brevity, and freedom from any self-complacent gasconading on the narrator's part, respecting either his party ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... were busy hatching mischief. He looked with aversion at the smiling, self-complacent ass whose resurrection tangled his plan. But his voice was very ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... welfare is the highest business that any state can give its attention to. To recognise or to fail to recognise the value of the human soul in other nations, determines its real greatness and grandeur, or its self-complacent but essential vacuity. It is possible for a nation, through subtle delusions, to get such an attack of the big head that it bends over backwards, and it is liable, in this exposed position, to get ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... seen the principle of combat, of competition, carried so far that it seems to have wrecked the race; so you will pardon my curiosity, I am sure. From your faces, one would conclude that you had abolished self-interest altogether. Just why are you so—well, extraordinarily self-complacent?" And he thrust out his aggressive jaw as though to make up for the lack of ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... other then than it is now; revolutionary fury had indeed spent itself upon many of its noblest monuments, but the interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent idiocy. The facade of the cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced; the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of its gateway were seen ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... shortly, and Margaret pondered on his strange manner, little guessing what profanation her mention of Amabel's letter had seemed to him, or how it jarred on him to hear this exaggerated likeness of his own self-complacent speeches. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... acquaintanceship with the ex-officer of the late King's Guard. Though he knew de Batz to be an ardent Royalist, and even an active adherent of the monarchy, he was soon conscious of a vague sense of mistrust of this pompous, self-complacent individual, whose every utterance breathed selfish aims rather than ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Luther where God was before He created heaven, Martin stunned his querist with the retort,—"He was building hell for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you." And everybody will recollect the story of the self-complacent cardinal who went to confess to a holy monk, and thought by self-accusation to get the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... out her photograph and again examined it, but not as a lover. Had she really grown stouter and more self-complacent? Was the spirituality and delicacy he had worshiped in her purely his own idiotic fancy? Had she always been like this? Yes. There was the girl who could weakly strive, weakly revenge herself, and weakly forget. There was the figure that he had expected to find carved upon the tomb which he had ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... grandfather by the common name of father. But this was not the case with Tembinok'. Now the ice was broken the word uncle was perpetually in his mouth; he who had been so ready to confound was now careful to distinguish; and the father sank gradually into a self-complacent ordinary man, while the uncle rose to his true stature as the hero ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability may have made his intercourse with them the easier—at any rate, on his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably not have regarded him at all. Of course they—the Rock Park sort of people—had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father, therefore, was never obliged ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... England as a member of Sir EDWARD GOSCHEN'S party. In the later portion of this book Mr. WILE castigates us, not too unkindly, but, perhaps, a little too insistently, for not being ready, for not realising what war means and for being self-complacent. Since his criticisms are based on affection for us we can make an effort to kiss the rod, especially as he discerns signs of improvement in us. Incidentally I may add that he is, perhaps, not altogether fair to Lord HALDANE, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... less would I avail myself of its acknowledged inappropriateness to the purposes of physiology, in order to cast a self-complacent sneer on the soul itself, and on all who believe in its existence. First, because in my opinion it would be impertinent; secondly, because it would be imprudent and injurious to the character of my profession; and, lastly, because it ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... wicked deeds;— [2:9]the Lord knows how to deliver the pious from trial, and to keep the wicked to the day of judgment to be punished, [2:10]but especially those who walk after the flesh, in corrupt desires, and despise government. Presumptuous, self-complacent, they fear not to revile glories, [2:11]where the angels who are greater in strength and power do not bring against them a reproachful judgment; [2:12]but these, like irrational animals, brutes made to be taken and destroyed, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... estimation, there may seem to be a knowledge of what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.[102] We're so much better than this rich young ruler who couldn't stand the test you put to him. We——"? Poor, self-confident Peter! When the fire test did come, and come so hot, how his "we" ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... midnight, sweep Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark To hear—and sink again-to sleep Or, at an earlier call, to mark, 40 By blazing fire, the still suspense Of self-complacent innocence; ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... duty, but the father had a high opinion of his son's vocal powers. In those days there was always service in the church on the Tuesday evenings; and when the father was asked on such occasions, "Who's to preach to-night?" his self-complacent reply used to be, "I divna ken wha's till preach, but my son's for till precent." The following is a more correct version of a betheral story than one which occupied this page in the last edition. The beadle had been asked to ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... took the cigarette which Lester handed him—no doubt with soothing intentions. And indeed his state of excitement and agitation appeared nothing less than pitiable to the friend who remembered the self-complacent young orator, the budding legislator ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... face when she peered into this formidable reflector of her own image was scarcely self-complacent or serene. It was rather studious, anxious, critical, almost fierce, like that one would expect to find on the face of an ancient alchemist contemplating an alembic of precious compounds. Year in, year out, ever since her gradually waning youth ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... you feel ticklish, too," suggested Peace, looking over her shoulder with a comical, self-complacent air at the crowded rear seat of the carryall. "I 'xpected to see some of you ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... rapid in the provinces which passed into the hands of these ruder tribes. But the phenomenon is natural and is illustrated by the fact that even now the advance of Christianity is more rapid in Africa than in India. The civilization of China was already old and self-complacent: not devoid of intellectual curiosity and not intolerant, but sceptical of foreign importations and of dealings with the next world. But the Tartars had little of their own in the way of literature and institutions: it was their custom to assimilate ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... type of public worker—a mixture of the mystical and the practical—was the terror of the Vienna delegates. He put spokes in everybody's wheel, behaved as the autocrat of the Congress and felt as self-complacent as a saint. Countess von Thurheim wrote of him: "He mistrusted his environment and let himself be led by others. But he was thoroughly good and high-minded and sought after the weal, not merely of his own country, but of the whole world. Son coeur eut embrasse le bonheur du monde." He realized ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... concluded that she was still under the glamour of an ancient superstition, and took the veil after a very commonplace and squalid Protestant fashion. This particular "fruit" against whom Carmichael in his young uncharitableness especially raged, because he was more self-complacent and more illiterate than his fellows, married the daughter of a rich self-made man, and on the father's death developed a peculiar form of throat disease, which laid him aside from the active work of the ministry—a mysterious providence, as he often explained—but ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... not wholly unlovely even in the most violent Irish enemy. We all like Johnston of Ballykilbeg—most of us rather like Colonel Saunderson, and Mr. Dunbar Barton is decidedly popular. But this Arnold Forster—with his dry, self-complacent, self-sufficient fanaticism—is intolerable and hateful. He never gets up without making one angry. There is no man whose genius would entitle him to half the arrogant self-conceit of this young member. Acrid, venomous, rasping, he injures ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... submits with an ill grace to the nuisance of spectacles, but flatters itself that after all they afford a measure of civilization. Thirty-five years ago Dr. Emile Javal, a Parisian oculist, contested this self-complacent inference, believing the terrible increase of near sight among school children to be due rather to a defect than to an excess of civilization. He conceived that the trouble must lie in the material set for the eye to work upon, namely, the printed page. He therefore instituted ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... French subject, a French National Guard, an American citizen, a Bedouin Arab, a Carmelite monk, a Chinese mandarin, an Osmanli, a red Indian, a Scottish shepherd, and by the unmistakable nose and self-complacent smirk on his countenance, it is clear that in each and every character Henry Lord Brougham feels himself thoroughly at home. The Sleeping Beauty is a clever composition. "Beauty," by the way, is ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... acquisition itself, as the very perfection of human conquest, was wanting equally to his language and deportment. The very details which he gave, were ostentatious; and the gracious smiles which covered his lips as he concluded, were those of the self-complacent person, who feels that he has just been saying those good things, which, of necessity, must command the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and generosity checked the flow of Ricardo's speech. Schomberg was concerned to keep within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which he seemed to feel ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... leave to you to say which of the two beings is the more dignified, which the more abject—a little organism of flesh and blood, at most not more than six feet high, liable to be destroyed by a tile off the roof, or a blast of foul gas, or a hundred other accidents; standing self-poised and self-complacent in the centre of such an universe as this, and asserting that it acknowledges no superior, and needs no guide—or the same being, awakened to the mystery of his own actual weakness, his possible strength; his own actual ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... seem to indicate sadness and gloom. During and after a bush fire the birds give to the notes a mournful cadence like the memories of joy that are past, a lament for the destruction of the grass among which last year's dome-shaped nests were hidden. The swamp pheasant also utters a contented, self-complacent chuckle, that resembles the "Goo! goo! goo!" of a happy infant, and occasionally a succession of grating, discordant, mocking sounds, "Tcharn! tcharn! tcharn!" The chuckle may be an expression as if gloating over the detection and assimilation of some favourite dainty, and the harsh notes a demonstration ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... A self-complacent smile curled her thin lips, as she quietly noted the effects of her somewhat lengthy speech. Like all efforts of an unexpected and startling nature it produced a decided sensation. The little lady in brocade and diamonds glared at her like a fury—her ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... staircase he made bold to go on his mission, as he thought, in defiance of Sir John's better judgment. He returned in a few minutes with a face of self-complacent exultation, and Miss Sharperson's compliments, and begs Sir John Bull will walk up and rest himself with a dish of tea, and has her thanks to him ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... boldness of his own nature inclined him, perhaps, rather to the adventurous Rienzi than to the self-complacent Colonna; and he considered that to the safety of the first he and his armed minions might be even more necessary than to that of the last. At present his main object was to learn from Rienzi the exact strength which he possessed, and how far he was ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of horror. (Then, dropping his hands, and thrusting his face forward fiercely at Morell, he goes on threateningly.) You shall see whether this is a time for patience and kindness. (Morell, firm as a rock, looks indulgently at him.) Don't look at me in that self-complacent way. You think yourself stronger than I am; but I shall stagger you if you have ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... cheap picture, but, ah me! I fear even the deft graciousness of the highest art could not have softened the rigid angularities of that youthful figure, its self-complacent vulgarity, its cheap finery, its expressionless ill-favor. York did not look at it a second time. He turned to the letter ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... frequented streets to his father-in-law's house without being recognised by any one. It might be doubted, indeed, whether any of his old friends would have recognised him, even if they had met him face to face in broad daylight, for he was by no means the ruddy, robust, self-complacent looking personage they had been accustomed to see in the old days when he was wont to ride into town on his black mare. His clothes were seamy and worn, and his physical proportions had shrunk so much ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... pure church by means of a spirit of discerning; their censorious outcries against the standing ministers and churches in general, their lay ordinations, their lay-preaching and public exhortings and administering sacraments; and their self-complacent, presumptuous spirit." Edwards believed that enthusiasts, though unlettered, might exhort in private, and even in public religious gatherings might be encouraged to relate in a proper, earnest, and modest manner their ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... abandoning stores so early in the day; a certain British merchant in Moscow expressing surprise that I should have "made such an egregious error" as to leave any provisions behind. I fancy most explorers have met this type of individual—the self-complacent Briton, who, being located for business or other purposes in a foreign or colonial city, never leaves it, and yet poses as an authority on the entire country, however vast, in which he temporarily resides. I can recall one of these immovable fixtures in India, who ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... pleasant rooms with well-spread tables and good clothing; they can talk about human nature being unjustly accused, and of the kindly impulses and good thoughts in everyone's breasts. Pshaw! anyone can preach thus from an altitude of a few thousands a year, but let these same self-complacent kind-hearted gentlemen descend in the social scale—let them look twice at a penny before spending it—let them face persistent landladies, exorbitant landlords, or the bitter poverty of the streets, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume |
