"Complacency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cases.' Thucydides would have had eyes for it in all its forms, mild or severe, simple or complex, pitiful or repulsive. He would show us the English upper and middle class, shaken out of its comfort and complacency, its easy and patronizing security, by the shock of war and bereavement, facing a future of unknown and terrifying ideas and forces, with the brutal tax-gatherer administering the coup de grâce to its equanimity: the working class, called to fight for a cause which it but dimly understood, in ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... I'm sure," said Miss Crane, with a mixture of hauteur and complacency that was as perplexing ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... be it from me to remove this veil which renders you such kind service. But, apart from this screen which the good God has placed between you and the miseries of this life, there is another of a darker and heavier shade, fabricated by the imagination, and which it draws with a perfidious complacency over the object which it behooves us the most to know and avoid—a seductive and deceitful veil which, while presenting things to us in a false light, exposes us to most deplorable ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... the motley," continued the other, not without complacency, observing the effect of his announcement on ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... enveloped in a chapeau more or less large or small, is shocked at the first attempt to wear one of a different size; and turns from the contemplation of the image presented in the glass with any thing but self-complacency, listening incredulously to the flattering encomiums of the not disinterested marchand de modes, who avers that "Ce chapeau sied parfaitement a Madame la Comtesse, et ce bonnet lui ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Job with some complacency; "my place here is worth twice that, let alone the money I've got in ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... hear," he said, adjusting himself in his chair with the complacency of a person who is thought worthy of ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... of the last century. When she is enthusiastic, her pen "darts rapidly along" and her "heart bounds;" if she grows indignant at Rousseau's ideal of feminine perfection, "the rigid frown of insulted virtue effaces the smile of complacency which his eloquent periods are wont to raise, when I read his voluptuous reveries." When she wants to prove that men of genius, as a rule, have ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Alberich and bids him slip home. But the Nibelung is past care or fear, and rising to insane heights of hatred lays upon the ring such a curse as might well shake its owner's complacency. "As it came to me through a curse, accursed be this ring! As it lent me power without bounds, let its magic now draw death upon the wearer! Let no possessor of it be happy.... Let him who owns it be gnawed by care and him who owns it not be gnawed by envy! ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... and ruffianism, with complacency and stupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and hustling us on all sides, how could we live, if it were not for the great, calm, scornful anarchists of the soul, whose high inviolable imaginations perpetually ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... just now, as he drew his chair to the fire, and rubbed his hands with great complacency, "I think we've worked pretty hard to-day; three palaces, four churches—besides odds and ends of ruins we dispatched in the way: to say nothing of old Nibby's lectures in the morning about the Volces, the Saturnines, the Albanians, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... The complacency with which we are able to state without fear of contradiction that the body of intelligent and thoughtful women do want suffrage must not obscure our perception of the equal truth of what we have just stated above. To accept this verity ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... mechanically Gordon's thoughts returned to the past, the past which had collapsed so utterly, so disastrously, so swiftly upon his complacency, robbing him of his sustenance, of Clare, of his home. The complaining voice of the old man finally pierced his abstraction. "If you are going to ride," Bartamon ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and death. Whom nature loveth she chasteneth is a truth as clearly written in human history as "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth" is written in the Bible. The true attitude toward the austere, for a philosophic as for a Christian mind, is one of complacency. Every severity is intended for benefit. By wars the enormity of war is made evident. By disease the necessity for observation of the laws of health is emphasized. Even death, in the order of things, at last is a blessing, for one generation must give ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... on board to return our visits, they by no means disdain to fasten their great round spectacles on their flat noses in order to inspect the profane drawings in our illustrated papers, the 'Vie Parisienne' for instance. And it is even with a certain complacency that they let their fingers linger upon the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the place, to interest himself in our favour, and to solicit the business with the viceroy. This person came to visit the president, whilst we were talking on the subject, and with great satisfaction and complacency in his countenance acquainted him, that he had at last succeeded in his applications, and that a passport for one of the officers of the Ladrone ship (or pirate) would be ready in a few days. The president ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... full that my hostess said she could not give me a bed— rather an unwelcome announcement to a wayworn traveller—and with considerable complacency she took me into a large, whitewashed, carpetless room, furnished with one chair, a small table, and my valise. She gave me two buffalo robes, and left me, hoping I should be comfortable! Rather disposed to quarrel with a hardship which shortly afterwards I should have laughed at, I ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... inhaling them and looking at them; and a dreamy, tender complacency crept over his heart, and softened his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... fatigues of the day; there was a wild, swimming, whirling sensation in his head that forced him to let his eyelids sink down; yet, just there, in the midst of his painful bewilderment, he realized with ecstatic complacency that the most martial-looking man in Louisiana was standing in his spurs with the hand of Louisiana's queenliest woman laid tenderly ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... the four puppets which Fate had dancing on its thread now underwent a change which completely altered the situation. The eyes of the boarders were no longer directed in anger and injured dignity at the pretty widow, but fell with complacency and sympathy upon the weeping girl, who now found friends at the expense of another, as so often happens—if ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... all things have both faded and darkened—you taste the chill of the place as you walk from room to room. It was still early in the day and in the season, and I flattered myself that I was the only visitor. This complacency, however, dropped at sight of a person standing motionless before a simpering countess of Sir Peter Lely's creation. On hearing my footstep this victim of an evaporated spell turned his head and I recognised my fellow lodger ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... and there has been known to pronounce it the finest piece of sculpture of our modern era. To Rowland it seemed to justify superbly his highest hopes of his friend, and he said to himself that if he had invested his happiness in fostering a genius, he ought now to be in possession of a boundless complacency. There was something especially confident and masterly in the artist's negligence of all such small picturesque accessories as might serve to label his figure to a vulgar apprehension. If it represented the father of the human race and the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... "built up" (it would be a mistake to say "drawn") by means of a T-square and the ruling pen; and if architectural drawing has not quite kept pace with that for general illustration since, a backward glance over the professional magazines encourages a feeling of comparative complacency. That so high a standard or so artistic a character is not observable in architectural as in general illustration is, I think, not difficult to explain. Very few of the clever architectural draughtsmen are illustrators by profession. ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... and spread them on the table. His latest piece of work was a medal in high relief bearing the heads of the Prince and Princess of Wales surrounded with a wreath. Bob had no political convictions; with complacency he drew these royal features, the sight of which would have made his father foam at the mouth. True, he might have found subjects artistically more satisfying, but he belonged to the people, and ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... connection with a thief and a forger; the woman deserved no mercy, and would receive none, if he had his way; none the less was he charmed by Cornelia's emotion, by her pity, her amazing inconsistency. Gone were her airs of complacency and independence; at the first threatening of danger the pretty pretence was broken up; weak, trembling, tearful, she summoned her natural protector to her side! Guest's heart swelled with a passion of tenderness. In his immaculate frock-coat, freshly-creased ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and Corporal Bunting were passing northward, the squire of Grassdale saw, with evident complacency, the passion growing up between his friend and his daughter. He looked upon it as a tie that would permanently reconcile Aram to the hearth of social and domestic life; a tie that would constitute the happiness of his daughter and secure to himself a relation in the man he felt most inclined ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... disorder in her countenance when she reached Choisy that even unobservant Ombreval whom continuous years of self-complacency had rendered singularly obtuse—could not help but notice it, and—fearing, no doubt, that this agitation might in some way concern himself—he even went the length of questioning her, his voice sounding the note ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... thousand times listening to him with that air of softness and complacency—Believe me, my dear, I am not angry with you for loving him; he is formed to charm the heart of woman: I have not the least right to complain of you; you knew nothing of my passion for him; you even regarded me almost as the wife ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... "Sunday" was the last straw for Jones, sweeping away breakfast, bank and everything; coming on top of the events of the last twenty-four hours, it brought his mental complacency to ruin, ruin from which shot blazing ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... issuing forage and rations, shoeing horses, caring for and sending away the sick and wounded, and in every way putting the command on a field footing again. It was a brief period of placid contentment. Satisfaction beamed from every countenance. Complacency dwelt in every mind. The soldiers smoked their pipes, cooked their meals, read the papers, wrote letters to their homes, sang their songs and, around the evening camp fires, recalled incidents, humorous, thrilling or pathetic, of the march and battle-field. There was not a ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... only money can bring. The time arrived when I applied in vain; the money had disappeared. Though I had no reason to suspect COX AND CO. of being dishonest I noticed a tone of assuredness and self-complacency in their letters strangely similar to that in my own, and I knew that I was being dishonest, so I demanded to see my pass-book. It was a horrid sight, and it gave me seriously to think. How came it that the side of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... of fluttering complacency, entered the living room. Lilian went first, and fell upon her knees with a sudden shriek, beholding the prone figure on the floor; the mother darted to her side, saw and partly understood, whipped out a vinaigrette, seized a caraffe ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... a narcissistic love of one's own ways, or which, extraverted, so to speak, becomes a fanatical ambition to impose one's own culture upon the world; or, on the other hand we might become too self-critical, too cosmopolitan, and too receptive toward all foreign culture. National conceit, complacency and destinism face us in one direction, the danger of losing our identity and our individuality and our mission in the other. These problems of course confront all nations; they are especially urgent in America, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Bartrum had taken possession of the most becoming corner in the library and was holding gay court there; the young people were thronging from one room to another; everybody was laughing and chatting and exclaiming over the charms of the new house. In fact the complacency of the hostess over her achievement was only surpassed by the curiosity of the guests who were confirming with their own eyes the wild rumors which had been current of ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... fears or hopes, as the case might be, to the whispers not yet audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established order of things in ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... opportunity, while at Nanking, to visit the mausoleum of the founder of the Ming dynasty, who lies buried near by, and whose descendants had been displaced by the Manchus. Happily for K'ang Hsi's complacency, the book of fate is hidden from Emperors, as well ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... before, in defense of the compromise measures. To his mind the events of those eight years had amply vindicated the great principle of popular sovereignty. Knowing that he was in a Republican stronghold, he dwelt with particular complacency upon the manful way in which the Republican party had come to the support of that principle, in the recent anti-Lecompton fight. It was this fundamental right of self-government that he had championed through good and ill report, all these ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... then reverted to the present lamentable condition of these United States, and with characteristic complacency pointed to the stability and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the grey head before him with as much complacency as he would a turnip; "and a serene old place it is ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... might do would stifle his complacency, and he talked on, seeking to be entertaining, no doubt, and pointing out the things of interest on every hand. And I enjoyed the scene, finding enough to view to make me indifferent to his posturing. Scarcely ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... distinguished were often foreigners; some English noblemen, such as the Duke of Dorset and Lord Strathavon being especially favored, for a reason which, as given by Mercy, shows that that insular stiffness which, with national self-complacency, Britons sometimes confess as a not unbecoming characteristic, was not at that time attributed to them by others; since the ambassador explains the queen's preference by the self-evident fact that the English gentlemen were the ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... went, and he has left on record the burning indignation aroused in him at the signs of satisfaction, complacency, and even mirth that he discovered in that house of death. The Queen herself, however, overwrought by the events, and perhaps conscience-stricken by the tragedy which in the eleventh hour she had sought to avert, burst into tears at sight of Sully, and brought in ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... solemnly pronounced—the head of the father exacted as the ransom for the life of the son—such were the methods by which the Provveditori of the Most Serene and Christian Republic enforced its authority, and which are related, not only without reprehension, but with manifest complacency and approval, by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... together. A good-natured man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... twelve since they had breakfasted there and had started spruce and fresh upon their last pleasure trip. What a world of fresh impressions had come upon them since then! How rudely they had been jostled out of their take-it-for-granted complacency! The same shimmering silver stars, as they had looked upon last night, the same thin crescent of moon—but they, what a chasm lay between that old ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... without its accompanying satisfaction. One can walk the streets of any of the university towns in his academic robes without being jeered at, as I am afraid he would be in some of our own thoroughfares. There is a noticeable complacency in the members of our Phi Beta Kappa society when they get the pink and blue ribbons in their buttonholes, on the day of annual meeting. How much more when the scholar is wrapped in those flowing folds, with their flaming borders, and feels the dignity ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... N. pleasure, gratification, enjoyment, fruition; oblectation, delectation, delection^; relish, zest; gusto &c (physical pleasure) 377; satisfaction &c (content) 831; complacency. well-being; good &c 618; snugness, comfort, ease; cushion &c 215; sans souci [Fr.], without worry, mind at ease. joy, gladness, delight, glee, cheer, sunshine; cheerfulness &c 836. treat, refreshment; amusement &c 840; luxury &c 377. mens sana in corpore sano [Lat.] [Juvenal], a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Thus rushing into the combat with the heat and vehemence of youth, he was of necessity compelled to experience the disappointment attendant upon such precipitancy. It was in vain that Philemon and myself endeavoured to make him completely satisfied with his purchase: nothing produced a look of complacency from him. At length, upon seeing the rising ground which was within two or three miles of our respective homes, he cheered up by degrees; and a sudden thought of the treasures contained in his Clement, De Bure and Panzer, darted ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... at dogs, alive or china, embroidered or painted. Fortunately most of my friends have "pets," griffons that look like tropical spiders, little shiny naked shivering animals, bloated prosperous Pekineses, exuding the complacency of their mistresses and seeming to be rather the last word of a dressmaker, or a furrier, than a creation of ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... with seeming gentleness and complacency. He told Feversham, that the king of England well knew that he might always be master of the peace; but some of the towns in Flanders it seemed very hard to demand, especially Tournay, upon whose fortifications such immense ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... of others as new and wondrous discoveries of his own genius and profound meditation; and all with such a simplicity and complacency of self-satisfied conviction, that you never dream or impugning the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... desire to provide an escape from a serious critical difficulty did not actually occasion that copies of S. Mark's Gospel were mutilated, it certainly was the reason why, in very early times, such mutilated copies were viewed without displeasure by some, and appealed to with complacency ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony, "I ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and Tom Yeo and Jim Rattenbury ... and Mary Graham. His father had always spoken contemptuously of Englishmen, but he had never been moved by this violent antipathy to them which moved Marsh ... and most of his talk against England was only talk, intended to sting the English out of their complacency ... and he was eager to preserve the Union between the two countries. But Marsh wished to be totally separate from England. He was vague, very vague, about points of defence, and he boggled badly when Henry, trying to think like a statesman, talked ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... with new-born life, and you can get an armful of first one variety and then another. I liked the collie puppies best, but the Byrd was crazy about the little fawn calf which old Buttercup is so proud of that she switches her tail in the greatest complacency. He was just showing me how to tempt her little white nose with a wisp of hay that she was learning to eat, and I was luxuriating with one new-born wriggler in my arms and two yellow-down puff-balls in my hand, when Sam and the mule came up ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to be heaven or hell according to the part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future life is reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source of complacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... has always been a haunting fear that this view was to be attributed to a personal bias in our own favor. When, however, our suspicion is suddenly confirmed by the only judge for whose opinion we have the least respect, our bosom heaves with complacency, and the world has ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... One other than ourselves to pray to, what is there to pray for? Or, to quote the actual question of a believer in this kind of immanence, Why ask outside for a strength which we already possess? What a naive question of this calibre reveals only too plainly is that self-complacency which is the most deadly foe of the spiritual life. One is reminded of the American story in which a bright and intelligent wife asks her cultured but indifferent husband, "Is it true that God is immanent ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... this, he "overlooked" her the next day, with a cigarette between his yellow-stained finger tips, which made her sneeze in a silent pantomimic way, and certain blandishments of speech which she received with more complacency. But I don't think she ever even looked at him. In vain he protested that she was the "dearest" and "littlest" of his "little loves"—in vain he asserted that she was his patron saint, and that it was his soul's delight ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... of the morning shone full upon the portrait, and, as I lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency; its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign and seal one's own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she were alive, I should love ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proper, Miss Devon; and I thank her for her care of my interests." And Mrs. King bowed her acknowledgment of the service with a perfect castanet accompaniment, whereat Miss Cotton bridled with malicious complacency. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... and attentive to them all; he talks with them, smiles with them, and treats them with every gentle complacency; but they do not live one instant in his memory. I mean they do not occupy his particular wishes; for with regard to every respectful sentiment towards the sex in general, and esteem to some amiable individuals, he is as awake as in ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the arguments, the correspondence, the work that is never finished when night comes, tell even upon that physical vigour and mental elasticity. Hodge sleeps sound and sees the days go by with calm complacency. The man who holds that solid earth, as it were, in the japanned boxes finds a nervous feeling growing upon him despite his strength of will. Presently nature will have her way; and, weary and hungry for fresh air, he rushes off for awhile to distant trout-stream, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... she stepped into the room I saw only a big frowsy woman, who had attempted to make a show with a new silk dress and a hat in the latest fashion, but who had lamentably failed owing to the slouchiness of her figure and some misadventure, by which her hat had been set awry on her head and her usual complacency destroyed. Later, I noted that her down-looking eyes had a false twinkle in them, and that, commonplace as she looked, she was one to steer clear of in times ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... now!" Did you ever, when twenty years old, look back at the diary you kept when you were sixteen,—or when twenty-five, at the diary you kept when twenty,—or at thirty, at the diary you kept when twenty-five? Was not your feeling a singular mixture of humiliation and self-complacency? What extravagant, silly stuff it seemed that you had thus written five years before! What Veal! and, oh, what a calf he must have been who wrote it! It is a difficult question, to which the answer cannot be elicited, Who is the greatest fool in this world? But every candid and sensible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... sleeping-room off it, were still knee-deep in chips, and filled with the carpenter's bench and tools, and all our luggage. Such as it was, it was a palace when compared to Old Satan's log hut, or the miserable cabin we had wintered in during the severe winter of 1833, and I regarded it with complacency ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... turned round to the jury with complacency, and smiled as if to say, 'You see, gentlemen, how it can be done by one who knows how.' ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... I say, Leonard Fairfield reclined in his lurking-place, if not with positive delight and intoxicating rapture, at least with tolerable content and some complacency. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... effort, you'll make it for my sake, won't you? And as a reward," pursued the Countess, as if to render her appeal more surely effective, "I shall do as much for you, and in a similar way. For I, too, intend counterfeiting complacency in a certain quarter, and in the interest of a different individual—Don Florencio. Now, ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... with the complacency of one who feels himself a great man in his present surroundings. "I witnessed many pageants in which he took part; and I was of the same company at the house of my Lord Craven, and was presented to him, and had ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... same great creature leaning her head on his shoulder, and listening with a charming complacency, while he purred to her of love and calm delights, alternate with still greater triumphs; for he was to turn dramatic writer, for her sake, was to write plays, a woman the hero, and love was to inspire him, and passion supply the want of pencraft. ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... from which they sprang. Nevertheless their origin clung to them, and they remained—to borrow a useful word from Mr. Santayana—"malicious" in regard to the world of science and common sense. It is only so that we can account for the complacency with which philosophers have accepted the inconsistency of their doctrines with all the common and scientific facts which seem best established ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... and ravenous pair of friends who scampered home at dinner-time that evening. The pallor was gone from Dick's face. His cheeks were glowing, and his eyes shone. He ate greedily. His parents looked covertly at each other. And the self-complacency lines around Hazen's ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Russian Ballet which almost assumed the proportions of Tartar invasions. London, too, has been invaded by the Russians and by the Irish. The Irish playwrights, indeed, are continually pounding away at British middle-class complacency. Germany, in turn, has been invaded by England (we regret that this sentence has only an artistic and figurative significance), and we find Max Reinhardt well on his way toward giving a complete cycle of the plays of Shakespeare; a few years ago we might have observed Deutschland ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... desolation came over him. He fumbled nervously as he dressed himself, in a state almost of childishness. He disliked the Scotch accent in Bertie's speech, and the slight response it found on Isabel's tongue. He disliked the slight purr of complacency in the Scottish speech. He disliked intensely the glib way in which Isabel spoke of their happiness and nearness. It made him recoil. He was fretful and beside himself like a child, he had almost a childish nostalgia ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... his own importance became a severe trial to Fraser, who was roused to his most elaborate efforts of sarcasm. The adventurer wasted hours in a search for fitting similes by which to measure the clubman's general and comprehensive ineptitude, all of which rebounded from his victim's armor of complacency. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... colonel had his way. Had the Virginian insisted upon waiting on the offending broker in a palanquin or upon the top of a four-in-hand, Fitz would have found the vehicle somehow, and have crawled in or on top beside him with as much complacency as if he had spent his whole life with palanquins and coaches, and had had no other interests. So when the order came for the carriage, Fitz winked at me with his left eye, walked to the sidewalk, whistled to a string of cabs, and the next instant we were all three whirling up ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... went on." In such a case as this it has usually happened that a strong boy of brutal and perverse instincts and some force of character initiates proceedings which the others either fall into with complacency or are too ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stillness of the night with the echoes of your English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble. Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware; but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any wandering ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... injurious, delay; but I feel sure that the public are prepared to put up with all this discomfort, loss, and privation if thereby their country marches triumphantly out of this great struggle. [Cheers.] We have every reason for confidence; we have none for complacency. Hope is the mainspring of efficiency; complacency is ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the Priest who down the field had come Unseen by Leonard, at the church-yard gate Stopp'd short, and thence, at leisure, limb by limb He scann'd him with a gay complacency. Aye, thought the Vicar, smiling to himself; 'Tis one of those who needs must leave the path Of the world's business, to go wild alone: His arms have a perpetual holiday, The happy man will creep about the fields Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his check, or solitary smiles ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... friendship formed in the Black Hawk war and strengthened at Vandalia induced "Major" Stuart to offer a partnership to "Captain" Lincoln. [Footnote: It is not unworthy of notice that in a country where military titles were conferred with ludicrous profusion, and borne with absurd complacency, Abraham Lincoln, who had actually been commissioned, and had served as captain, never used the designation after he laid down ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... complacency point to the fact that these rates do not cover the forwarding of passengers' baggage and that this service must be paid for separately. These charges, however, are very moderate, being on 120 pounds of baggage 8-1/3 cents a distance of 34 miles or less, about ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... Aunt Rachel went on after this strain, she was a kind, good soul, in the main, and, I could see, was sorry for having hurt the feelings of Mary Lane. But she didn't like to acknowledge that she was in the wrong; that would detract too much from the self-complacency with which she regarded herself. Knowing her character very well, I thought it best not to continue the little argument about the importance of words, and so changed the subject. But, every now and then, Aunt Rachel would return to it, each time softening a little towards Mary. ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... little repugnance to any revolution or any peril confined to a state whose councils it had been the object of his life to baffle, and whose power it was the manifest interest of his native city to impair. He might have looked with complacency on the intrigues which the regent was carrying on against the Spartan government, and which threatened to shake that Doric constitution to its centre. But nothing, either in the witness of history or in the character or conduct of a man profoundly patriotic, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the introduction, with a "How-d'ye-do-who-the-deuce-are-you?" expression on his face. He struck Graeme as not bad-looking, in a somewhat over-fed and self-indulgent fashion, and inclined to superciliousness and self-complacency, if not to actual superiority and condescension. It occurred to him afterwards that this might arise from his absorption in his companion, for he turned again at once to Miss Brandt and began chattering like a ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... is the exception that proves the rule; he may be persecuted, but he persecutes not again. He is the best authenticated type living of primitive Christian. That the religion of Jesus was a purely reactionary movement, suggested by the smug complacency and voluptuous condition of the times, most thinking men agree. Where rich Pharisees adopt a standard of life that can only be maintained by devouring widows' houses and oppressing the orphan, the needs of the hour bring to the front a man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... it is, who going afterwards to the universities, in preponderating numbers to Oxford, make for themselves a congenial atmosphere, disturbed only by faint ripples of that vast intellectual renascence in which the new shape of civilisation is forming. With self-complacency unshaken, they assume in due course charge of Church and State, the Press, and in general the leadership of the country. As lawyers and journalists they do our talking for us, let who will do the thinking. Observe that their strength lies in the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... The Secretary stayed a long while, and Lucia felt at times that he was watching her with an eye that read her throughout; but when she saw him looking at Helen Harley she thought she knew the reason of his complacency. She, too, was acute. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the bedroom floor at once took the eye of Stillman. He regarded the broken places in the plaster and prodded the slivers of wood and glass with the toe of his shoe with much complacency. ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... should look upon the gentleman with no clothing except a scanty forelock, and with no personal property save his scythe and hour-glass, as my greatest enemy,—and I should behold the perpetual efforts made to kill him with perfect complacency. This, I know, is not regarded as a strictly moral act; for this murderer of murderers is very much caressed by those who, in the name of Moses, would send a poor devil to his hempen destiny for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... pledge itself and the Church to any popular theory of the mode of justification or of the future punishment of the wicked; and that it now stands declared that it is no doctrine of the Church of England that "every part of the Bible is inspired, or is the word of God." The Dean also looks with complacency upon what he declares to be a fact, and which we are startled to hear; that "the belief in endless punishment is altogether fluctuating, or else expresses itself in forms wholly untenable ... that the doctrine of endless torments, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... well trained by Nina herself, for on arrival at the altar they stood demurely, one on each side of her, the pretty page occupying his place behind, and still holding up the end of the velvet train with a charming air of hauteur and self-complacency. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... in music one finds still truer in the other arts. One keeps coming on it everywhere—the egotism of cities, the self-complacency of the crowds swerving the finer and the truer artists from their functions, making them sing in hoarse crowd-voices instead of singing in their own and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has been corroded by crowds. Some of us have been ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... man in the corner, with that strange mixture of nervousness and self-complacency which had set Miss Polly Burton wondering, "well, you see, I had made up my mind long ago where the hitch lay in this particular case, and I was not so surprised ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite comfortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to view the scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open window to make the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and so shall be Till they are told and told, and told again; For men are children, waiting to be told, And most of them are children all their lives. The good God in his wisdom had them so, That now and then a madman or a seer May shake them out of their complacency And shame them into deeds. The major file See only what their fathers may have seen, Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing. I do not say it matters what they saw. Now and again to some lone soul or other God speaks, ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... committing herself, and he in his complacency was glad to hope that he was making a new customer. She had to be careful not to betray any of the real and extensive knowledge about Wall Street which she actually possessed. But the glib misrepresentations about United Traction ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... nevertheless, not opposed to others taking an interest in him. He cared too little about either church or Sunday school to see that Frank was a regular attendant. But he was very willing that somebody else should take an interest in the matter. Moreover, he felt not a little complacency over the fact that his son was chosen as a companion by Lawyer Lloyd's son. Engrossed as he was in the making of money, a big, burly, gruff, uncultured contractor, he found time somehow to acquire a great respect for Mr. Lloyd. He thought him rather too scrupulous and straightforward a man ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... "virtually exscinding act" of the General Assembly of 1861, which was the occasion of the secession of the Southern Presbyterians. The historian of the Southern Presbyterians, who remarks with entire complacency that the "victory" of 1837 was won "only by virtue of an almost solid South," seems quite unconscious that this kind of victory could have any force as a precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," pp. 335, 359). But it is natural, no ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... have thought me the finest-spirited young man he had ever met, or ever would meet, in the whole of his life. Indeed, I reflected, there could not be many such as myself—of that I felt sure, and the conviction produced in me the kind of complacency which craves for self-communication to another. I had a great desire to unbosom myself to some one, and as there was no one else to speak to, I addressed ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... regard. For she came out of the great road at Lippock, which is just by, and, reposing herself on a bank smoothed for that purpose, lying about half a mile to the east of Wolmer Pond, and still called Queen's Bank, saw with great complacency and satisfaction the whole herd of red deer brought by the keepers along the vale before her, consisting then of about five hundred head. A sight this, worthy the attention of the greatest sovereign! But he farther adds that, by means of the Waltham blacks, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... in my moments of self-complacency that this extensive biographical Work, however inferior in its nature, may in one respect be assimilated to the 'Odyssey.' Amidst a thousand entertaining and instructive episodes the Hero is never long out of sight; for they are all in some degree connected ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the man animal long ago knocked Young Gratitude on the head, heaved him overboard into a leaky gig, and left him behind to ogle the seagulls. He is a healthy pirate, this man animal, accustomed with great complacency to maroon the trustful stowaway when he comes to nose about the cargo of his brig, or thrusts his pleading in between the ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance, and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one's body?),—who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an even securer possession, something ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... not for what my friend told me of their profound significance to him, I should scarcely have been interested enough in their contents to read them through. At the same time, I know that the men who, from the standpoint of their professionally religious complacency would have condemned Major Powell, never spent one-thousandth part the time, nor felt one ten-thousandth the real solicitude that he did about seeking "the way, the ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... the hand he held; and, soothed by the well-timed compliment, he seated himself next to Lady Juliana with some complacency. As she insisted on having her husband on the other side of her, Mr. Douglas was condemned to take his station by the hated Lady Maclaughlan, who, for the first time observing ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... a grin. He liked grandly to have the notion fathered on himself; and his complacency of course was suggestive of the hakim's trustworthiness. But the ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... of it myself, and it was not without complacency that I recounted to Nurse Bundle my first essay in "visiting ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... had sprung from a principle into a passion; a fortifying trust, less in the Power that rules the universe than in the peculiar virtues of the Episcopal prayer-book when bound in black; a capacity for self-sacrifice which had made the South a nation of political martyrs; complacency, exaltation, narrowness of vision, and uncompromising devotion to an ideal—these were the qualities which had passed from the race into the individual and through the individual again back into the very blood and the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... candle-box was placed, and within it, swathed in staring red flannel, lay the last arrival at Roaring Camp. Beside the candle-box was placed a hat. Its use was soon indicated. "Gentlemen," said Stumpy, with a singular mixture of authority and EX OFFICIO complacency,—"gentlemen will please pass in at the front door, round the table, and out at the back door. Them as wishes to contribute anything toward the orphan will find a hat handy." The first man entered with his hat on; he uncovered, however, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the old folks a good time and that they missed nothing in my manner. And, indeed, I think that they missed nothing in Rosalie's. They had the gentle complacency of the aged who bask ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... Macaulay well expresses it,[23:1] "was, in truth, one of those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions." To him had succeeded his most worthy son: a king whose perfidy and duplicity were only equalled by his self-complacency and power of self-deception, who never looked facts in the face, but placidly expected them to conform to his own petty desires, and whose dignified death failed to atone for a life devoted to ignoble personal ends, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... now, not by reflection, but by his own luminosity. He gathered together his endless notes and records, and began to write his biography; but he did not hurry. Several biographies of Johnson appeared, in the four years after his death, without disturbing Boswell's perfect complacency. After seven years' labor he gave the world his Life of Johnson. It is an immortal work; praise is superfluous; it must be read to be appreciated. Like the Greek sculptors, the little slave produced a more enduring work than the great master. The man who reads it will ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the doorway, and, by the half start and blush, I saw that I was plainly recognized, and with pleasure. We were formally presented by Don Pedro, and, after the old skipper had been flattered into an ecstasy of mingled admiration and self-complacency, Donna Clara ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... of clever tricks in Berlin," said Hillyard cheerfully. He could afford to contemplate that cleverness with complacency, for it was ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... been looking longingly for sixteen months. Then he "celebrated" by starting to take life easy. He developed a manner of superiority. He acted as if the little foothill he had climbed was a big mountain. He sunned himself on the top, basking in complacency because he had risen above ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... the crevices of the window shutters. This head, however, does not seem characteristic of Christ; it wants the gravity, the soft melancholy and unassuming meekness of the great Reformer: in short, from the vivid fire of the eyes and the too great self-complacency of the countenance, it gave me ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... car, pouring thanks and praises into it; she never vouchsafed a word of reply. All she did was to shudder now and then, and cry at intervals. Yet, whenever he left her side, her whole body became restless; and when he came back to her, a furtive thrill announced the insane complacency his bare contact gave her. Surely, of all the forms in which love torments the heart, this was the most terrible ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... its burdens. Eloquent appeals to your passions, to your State pride, to your native courage, to your sense of real injury, were used to prepare you for the period when the mask which concealed the hideous features of DISUNION should be taken off. It fell, and you were made to look with complacency on objects which not long since you would have regarded with horror. Look back to the arts which have brought you to this state—look forward to the consequences to which it must inevitably lead! Look back to what was first told you as an inducement to enter into this dangerous course. ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... on the prerogatives and lofty offices to which Christ calls those who love Him; not to minister to self-complacency, as if we were so much better than other men, but to deepen our sense of responsibility, and stir us to strenuous efforts to be what we are called to be. If Christian people thought more earnestly on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren |
