"Smugness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That there should have been found critics to combine just but wholly otiose condemnation of Cloe with reverential appreciation of the absurdities of Clorin and Thenot, and to clap applause to the self-conscious virtue, little removed from smugness, in which the 'moral grandeur' of the Lady of the Ludlow masque is clothed, is indeed a striking witness to the tyranny of conventional morality. If virginal purity were in fact the hypocritical convention which it is to some extent possible to condone in the Aminta, but ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... "consecrated priest of the Ideal," his gentle soul finding rest and peace after the myriad troubles and tumults of life. Still now is the once active, fertile, stimulating mind of the man who so effectively roused his generation from its complacent smugness and indifference in its appreciation of the beautiful, and with ardent boldness challenged established beliefs in art and defied the conventionality and authority of his time. His has been a powerful ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... tick. His little home, his household goods, the daily routine of his toil for the worldly rewards of life, his paltry jealousies of next-door neighbours are dwarfed to insignificance. They no longer matter, for the judgment of God is at hand. The smugness of his self-complacency, his life-long hypocrisy in the shirking of truth, are broken up. He feels naked, and afraid, clinging only to the hope that he may yet have time to build up a new character, to acquire new spiritual strength, and to do some of the things he has left undone—if only ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... it end? What would happen next? Nothing was too outrageously, maniacally impossible. I walked up Sloane Street, a street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person, comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains of Bedlam had ever conceived. Why should not this little lady tripping along with gold chain-bag and anxious, shopping knit of the brow, throw her ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... plates of thick, greasy bread-and-butter; just the right fare to offer a girl who has put away several benedictines and brandies. The room chilled me. Place, people, appointments, even the name—Midnight Crusade for the Reclamation of our Fallen Sisters—smacked of everything that is most ugly. Smugness and super-piety were in the place. The women—I mean, ladies—who manage the place, were the kind of women I have seen at the Palace when Gaby is on. (For you will note that Gaby does not attract the men; it is not they who pack the Palace nightly to see her ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... strain of the stuff and the onward swirl of his verse we see that this man stood for truth and justice as against hypocrisy and oppression. Folly and freedom are better far than smugness and persecution. Byron stood for the rights of the individual, for the right of free speech and free thought: and he stood for political and physical freedom, long before abolition societies became popular. He sided with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... If I can't reach you in any other way, perhaps insult will jar you out of your state of moral smugness. How dare you even consider having me tried for stealing money from the Cassylia casino when all I was doing was conforming to their own code of ethics! They run crooked gambling games, so the law under their local ethos must be that ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... faint smile. The cruelty of the soldier, accustomed to violent deaths, was in it. There was, too, a curious smugness, a ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... to a fascinating woman whom he still loves. At first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures, and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James |
