"Self-complacency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time that Philistinism met its match in Oscar Wilde, and for the first time in its history felt its self-complacency shaken. Up to that time it had been very proud of itself. With the loss of that pride it blundered, and it remained for du Maurier to show that the height of Philistinism in a Philistine is to pretend not to be ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... disciple of Voltaire; but he calmly beat Panshine on every point. He proved the impracticability of reforming by sudden bounds, and of introducing changes haughtily schemed on the heights of official self-complacency—changes which were not justified by any intimate acquaintance with the country, nor by a living faith in any ideal, not even in one of negation, and in illustration of this he adduced his own education. He demanded before every ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... in his wrath and the general determined to be discreetly silent as to his recent tender of politeness to Morrison through the captain of the guards. Furthermore, Totten's self-complacency assured him that the mayor of Marion was leaving the affairs on Capitol Hill in the hands of the accredited commander on ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... the few thin things retained the sun soon worked his will. Latterly while in the open air I have abandoned the principal part of the superfluous remnant, to the enjoyment of additional comfort and the increase of self-complacency. As a final violation of my reserve be it proclaimed that to the super-excellence of the air of the Island, to the tonic of the sea, and to the graciousness of his Majesty the Sun—in whose radiance have I gloried—do I owe, perhaps, salvation from that which tributary friends ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... remained musing in his chair. At times he thought he would light another cigar, but the hand that he carried to his breast pocket dropped nervelessly to his knee again, and he did not smoke. Through his memories of disappointment pierced a self-reproach which did not permit him the perfect self-complacency of regret; and yet he could not have been sure, if he had asked himself, that this pang did not heighten the luxury of his ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... things may continue; and the way to insure its continuance is to provide for a thoroughly efficient navy. The refusal to maintain such a navy would invite trouble, and if trouble came would insure disaster. Fatuous self-complacency or vanity, or short-sightedness in refusing to prepare for danger, is both foolish and wicked in such a nation as ours; and past experience has shown that such fatuity in refusing to recognize or prepare for any crisis ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Trochu has the first to win, and he apparently scorns the latter. He is a species of military doctrinaire, and he finds it difficult to avoid lecturing soldiers or civilians at least once a day. I was looking at him the other day, and I never saw calm, serene, self-complacency more clearly depicted upon the human countenance. Failure or success will find him the same—confident in himself, in his plans, and his grand thoughts. If he eventually has to surrender, he will console himself by coupling with the announcement of his intention many observations—very ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... and hate the sex because, I suspect, you know very little about them," Mr. Pen continued, with an air of considerable self-complacency. "If you dislike the women in the country for being too slow, surely the London women ought to be fast enough for you. The pace of London life is enormous: how do people last at it, I wonder—male and female? Take a woman of the ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has in all ages been the practice of Theologians. Of that practice they are proud, as was the mouse of our Fabulist. Clothed in no other panoply than their own conceits they deem themselves invulnerable. While uttering the wildest incoherencies their self-complacency remains undisturbed. They remind one of that ambitious crow who, thinking more highly of himself than was quite proper, strutted so proudly about with the Peacock's feathers in which he had bedecked himself.—Like him, they plume themselves upon ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... depths, one must devote a little time to the exterior of this person. Its physical basis was slender, and short, and dark; and the face, which was fine-featured and assisted by pigments, varied from an insecure self-complacency to an intelligent uneasiness. His face and head had been depilated, according to the cleanly and hygienic fashion of the time, so that the colour and contour of his hair varied with his costume. This he ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... all redemption is to be found,—these affirmations and these assurances, which have so often restored the guilty and remodelled the human heart, made a salutary, if brief, impression upon her. Nor were the lives of these Dissenters (for the most part austerely moral), nor the peace and self-complacency which they evidently found in the satisfaction of conscience and fulfilment of duty, without an influence over her that for a while both chastened ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life: he, with his education, refinement, accomplishments, and talent, was merely a piece of driftwood. Sylvie Barry had been right,—he was a useless appendage to the world. Ah, no wonder she despised him! Sturdy, honest Jack Darcy could find a place. His self-complacency was more than touched,—it was shattered, completely broken up. The present was blank and colorless, the future like a thick mist in which there penetrated not one ray of light. What did all his elaborate philosophies for him now?—art, that was ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... which consider, always render themselves. Ladies who doubt always solve their doubts in the one direction. Of course she would accept him;—and of course he would stand to his guns. As he went to his work he endeavoured to bathe himself in self-complacency; but, at the bottom of it, there was a substratum of ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... for the political economy that with self-complacency leaves everything to settle itself by the law of supply and demand, as if that were all the law and the prophets. The name is applied to every science that affects to dispense with the spiritual as a ruling ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... ripen, but sour?" Honoria asked maliciously. Her companion's invincible self-complacency frequently amused her. Then she added:—"But, you know, I'm very fond of him. It isn't altogether easy to keep straight as a young boy, is it? Depend upon it, it is ten times more difficult to keep straight as an old one. For a man of that temperament it can't be ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... off flushed with beer and self-complacency; for he thought he had drawn the line precisely; had faithfully discharged his promise to his lady and benefactress, but not so as to make ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... fellow, with the brass of a merryandrew, and the gravity of a quack-doctor, pressed through the throng, and approached the beast. Suddenly there was silence. It was plain to the vulgar that the solemn new-comer had brought with him some exquisite specific: it was evident, from the grave self-complacency of the stranger, that with a glance, he had detected the cause of sickness in the horse,—and that, in a few seconds, the prostrate animal, revivified by the cunning of the sage, would be up, and once more curvetting and caracoling. The master of the steed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... than disappointed at Mrs. Richard's non-appearance, for aside from a curiosity to see the great lady, there was a desire to be able to report that she seen her to other females equally curious, whom she would next day meet at church. It would have added somewhat to her self-complacency as well as importance in their eyes, could she have quoted Mrs. Richard's sayings, and, described Mrs. Richard's dress, the very first day after her arrival. It would look as if the intimacy, which many predicted would end with Mrs. Ethelyn's coming, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... great fellow half a dozen strokes. Hereupon all the bystanders, and the officers of his Excellency, burst into a fit of tremendous laughter, and the big coward was allowed to escape, sneaking off like a dog with his tail between his legs. The Rais came up to me smiling with great self-complacency, and said—"Well, isn't that the way to administer justice?" I then astonished the hangers-on of his Excellency's Court, by relating to them some account of the expeditions to the North Pole. They asked me whether any ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... them in just proportion to the integrity or baseness of the motives by which they are actuated. This is in reality the most precious endowment of man. Hence it comes that the good man feels a pride and self-complacency in acts of virtue, takes credit to himself for the independence of his mind, and is conscious of the worth and honour to which he feels that he has a rightful claim. But, if all our acts are predetermined by something out of ourselves, if, however virtuous and honourable are ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... of this English People; and I do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world. They have not done yet, I calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... guide's vivid imagination saved the travellers from the fury of the Alban people, by preventing that fury, and supplying in its place self-complacency. The Alban people felt satisfied with themselves and with this story. They accepted it as undoubted; they took it to their homes and to their hearts; they enlarged, adorned, improved, and lengthened it out, until, finally, it assumed the amplest proportion, and ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... cruelty of the Roman public shows may, perhaps, leave with the children of the modern world a feeling of self-complacency. Yet it might seem well to ask ourselves—it is always well to do so, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance, or of great religious persecutions on this side or on that, or of anything else ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... follows the self-complacency of the last act! That was an honest attempt to redress a real wrong; this is an arbitrary determination to enforce a Brissotine or Rousseau's ideal on ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... goes to admiring his own skill, or airing his own powers, or imitating the choice touches of others, or heeding the breath of conventional applause; if he yields to any strain of self-complacency, or turns to practising smiles, or to taking pleasure in his self-begotten graces and beauties and fancies;—in this giddy and vertiginous state he will be sure to fall into intellectual and artistic sin. The man, in such a case, is no more smitten with a genuine love of Art ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... disciple and companion, that, overcome by the general importunity, she found herself obliged to comply. Now it was that her merit shone conspicuously. Placed at the head of the most opulent house in Rome, no symptom of pride, of haughtiness, or of self-complacency, ever revealed itself in her looks or in her actions. She was never heard to speak a harsh or impatient word. Firm in requiring from every person in her house the proper fulfilment of their duties, she did it in the gentlest manner. Always courteous to her servants, she urged them ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... predetermined, Britain, France, and Russia were all distracted by domestic controversies. She trusted also to her reading of the minds and temper of her opponents; and here she went wildly astray, as must always be the fate of the nation or the man who is blinded by self-complacency and by ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... expectation of receiving good in return from our neighbours takes the place of a desire to reciprocate; we consider ourselves the proper object of grateful thoughts, &c., on the part both of receiver and of spectators. We are affected with the gratification of a benevolent desire, with self-complacency, and with undefined hopes. When we have inflicted injury, there is the expectation of evil, and a combination of feelings summed up in the word Remorse. But Remorse, like other sentiments, may fail in the absence of cultivation of mind or under ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... introduced his sister to Mrs. Fullerton and Hadria. Miss Temperley was his junior by a year; a slight, neatly-built young woman, with a sort of tact that went on brilliantly up to a certain point, and then suddenly collapsed altogether. She had her brother's self-complacency, and an air of encouragement which Mrs. Gordon seemed ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... asked for, the writer added wise words of caution and counsel—words so fitted to George Muller's exact need that he saw plainly the higher Hand that had guided the anonymous writer. In that letter he was urged to "seek by watching and prayer to be delivered from all vanity and self-complacency," to make it his "chief aim to be more and more humble, faithful, and quiet," and not to be of those who "say 'Lord, Lord,' but have Him not deeply in their hearts." He was also reminded that "Christianity consists not in words ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... years she is the cleverest person of her time. And that is indeed saying a great deal; for how seldom do we find harmonious culture in people two years old? The strongest of the many strong proofs of her inward perfection is her serene self-complacency. After she has eaten she always spreads both her little arms out on the table, and resting her cunning head on them with amusing seriousness, she makes big eyes and casts cute glances at the family all around her. Then she straightens up and with the most vivid expression ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with perspiration. Eyeing her curiously for a moment, "Ho, ho!" he cried (his usual introductory exclamation), "do you bake the bread?" The woman, staring in astonishment, and, fortunately for her own self-complacency, not understanding the point of the strange question, replied, "No, your grace, that is not my department; I am in the laundry, and my business is"—"Oh, never mind," said the duke, with the look of one greatly relieved, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... he animadverted, among other things, on the spread of intemperance, of political corruption, on the profligacy of the press, and, amid them all, the self-complacency and boastfulness of the national spirit, as if ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... he was very proud of them; while conversing he would often look at them with an air of self-complacency. He also fancied he had fine teeth, but his pretension to that advantage was not so well founded as his vanity on the score of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... medical and surgical knowledge is modern, though flattering to our self-complacency, is disturbed by the study of the state of knowledge in the time of Hippocrates. To him we are indebted for the classification of diseases into sporadic, epidemic, and endemic, and he also separated acute ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... inconsiderable strength; for Lumley never contracted the habits of personal abruptness and discourtesy common to men in power who wish to keep applicants aloof. He was bland and conciliating to all men of ranks; his intellect and self-complacency raised him far above the petty jealousies that great men feel for rising men. Did any tyro earn the smallest distinction in parliament, no man sought his acquaintance so eagerly as Lord Vargrave; no man complimented, encouraged, "brought ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a fine strawberry into cream and ate it. Her laugh was pleasant, and she had a general air of good humour and self-complacency about her which some people ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... Emperor's beard; querelle d'Allemand. You Anglo-Saxon Yankees have something of the same kind also.... Your battles are bloody; ours wordy; these chatterers really cannot govern Prussia. I must bring some opposition to bear against them; they have too little wit and too much self-complacency—stupid and audacious. Stupid, in all its meanings, is not the right word; considered individually, these people are sometimes very clever, generally educated—the regulation German university culture; but of politics, beyond the ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... profound esteem for the exalted virtue, the person, and accomplishments of the knight, dashed as they were with a mixture of extravagance and insanity. Even Sir Launcelot himself was elevated to an extraordinary degree of self-complacency on the fortunate issue of his adventure, and became more and more persuaded that a knight-errant's profession might be exercised, even in England, to the advantage of the community. The only person of the company who seemed unanimated with the general ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... and unsatisfying. These 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 ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... a while, possessed by the girl's image. Then he revolved in his mind all that curious, stirring and tragic adventure, in which he had been so very near succumbing; and, taking a hand-glass from the table, he gazed for a long time and with a certain self-complacency at his features, which illness and pain had not succeeded in impairing to any ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... between this examination and mine; but when it was over, I rejoiced at the severity of my ordeal. My pride, my darling pride, was tickled at the triumph of my talents; and as I wiped away the perspiration from my forehead, I related my difficulties, my trials, and my success, with a degree of self-complacency that in any other person I should have called egregious vanity. One good effect resulted from my long examination, which continued an hour and a half—this was, that the captains passed all the other midshipmen with very few ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... respectable, should be intimate with any one she would blush to know elsewhere. It is only on that account, for I never suffer her to be with any one but in my company," added she, sitting more erect; and a smile of self-complacency dressed ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... godfather, are hovering over the crib like twin guardian angels. And Mildred sits en grande tenue on her cricket, in a speechless trance of delight, and nurse rustles about in her new silk gown and white lace cap with an air of importance and self-complacency almost indescribable. The domestic picture only wants papa and mamma to make ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... such train that they were sure to roll on smoothly to the end of time. "At present, and for the future," he wrote, "your Majesty is and will be more strictly obeyed than any of your predecessors;" adding, with insane self-complacency, "and all this has been accomplished without violence." He also assured his Majesty as to the prosperous condition of financial affairs. His tax was to work wonders. He had conversed with capitalists who had offered him four millions yearly for the tenth ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the room and stood before a Psyche, where for some time she scrutinized her own features; not with the self-complacency of a vain woman, but with the critical acuteness of an artist who contemplates a fine picture. Gradually her eyes grew soft and her mouth rippled with a smile. Like a mourning Juno she stood in the long black ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Fish, flesh, and fowl now offered themselves to his endeavors, and these were to be supplied by land, sea, and sky. This sudden enlargement of his resources, and also of his sphere of operations, caused him to feel additional satisfaction, together with a natural self-complacency. To the ordinary mind Ile Haute appeared utterly deserted and forlorn—a place where one might starve to death, if he had to remain for any length of time; but Tom now determined to test to the utmost the actual resources of the island, so as to prove, to himself what one unaided ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... of permanent value can come from medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something else distinctively our own—a vast contribution to the world's progress. This self-complacency makes us forget that whatever truth there may be in the great theory of evolution, certainly the validity of the theory is not confirmed by the intellectual history of the human race. As was said of the Patriarchal Age so we may say of Dante's times "there were giants in those ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... a masterly piece of writing, will shew the trouble that he took over his method, 'obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.' And he knew the value of his work, which the man with the note-book never does. In his moments of self-complacency he could compare his Johnsoniad with the Odyssey; and he will not repress his 'satisfaction in the consciousness of having largely provided for the instruction and entertainment of mankind.' Literary models before him he had none. Scott suggests ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... her life with the well-known long-winded self-complacency of the hysterical subject. She frequently had visions of Jesus, and again and again she emphasised the beauty of his hands. "Standing by my side, he said to me: 'I have come to thee, my daughter, I am here; it is I; show me thy hands.' And it seemed to me that he took my hands ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... may win for such persons a name in society above that which they deserve, and the moralist is bound to unmask them. These studies nevertheless are somewhat sombre;[W] and there is something much lighter and pleasanter in his presentation of some not unfamiliar phases of manners. There is the self-complacency that deals with itself like a "truant reader skipping over the harsh places"; the frank discourtesy that finds something vicious in the conventions and "circumstance" of good breeding; the patronising insolence[X] that "with much ado seems to recover your name"; the egoism of discontent that ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... dudelet!" mused Winifred, with a smile; "his self-complacency will be short-lived whenever he meets Isabel. She will simply annihilate him with one of ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... and Wordsworth's manner has not tact enough to prevent these defects from being felt to the full. On the contrary, in his constant desire frugally to extract, as it were, its full teaching from the minutest event which has befallen him, he supplements the self-complacency of the autobiographer with the conscientious exactness of the moralist, and is apt to insist on trifles such as lodge in the corners of every man's memory, as if they were unique lessons ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... years ago; but it will be four hundred before I forget the wind of self-complacency that rose in me, and strained my buttons when I marked the deference for me evoked in the faces of my fellow-rabble, and noted, mingled with it, a puzzled and resentful expression which said, as plainly as speech could ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... from within me was, yes, I could go; I could pass that picture; I could feel it glooming ever and ever upon me from behind my back, and never turn my head;—such an impetus of hate was upon me, driving me forward after the wretch fleeing in self-complacency and triumph into a future of wealth and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to play the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an acquiescence in being put out ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... must have managed to convince him that I neither was, nor ever had been, a rival of his, for the fortnight of fury against me terminated in a fit of exceeding graciousness and amenity, not unmixed with a dash of exulting self-complacency, more ludicrous than irritating. Pelet's bachelor's life had been passed in proper French style with due disregard to moral restraint, and I thought his married life promised to be very French also. He often boasted to me what a terror he had been to certain ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... In games of pure skill, such as chess, and, in a less degree, billiards, a man must be a fool who deceives himself upon such a point; but in whist there is a sufficient amount of chance to enable him to preserve his self-complacency for some time—let us say, his lifetime. If he loses, he ascribes it to his 'infernal luck,' which always fills his hands with twos and threes; and if he wins, though it is by a succession of four by honours as long as the string of four-in-hands when the Coaching Club meets in ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... but men: no gods are we To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak, Each separate, on his painful peak, Thin-cloaked in self-complacency! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... surpasses all description, and a languishing leer upon his countenance, in which there seemed to be something arch and ironical. The ring, which he put upon her finger, he had concealed till the moment it was used. He now produced it with an air of self-complacency. It was a curious antique, set with rose diamonds: he told us afterwards, it had been in the family two hundred years and was a present from his grand-mother. These circumstances agreeably flattered the pride of our aunt Tabitha, which had already ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... assuming an air of great self-complacency, "we military politicians had needs keep our wits whetted, and be careful how much honey we mix with the brimstone. But I must go look up my chickens; and if the devil, as some say, regulates the future affairs of politicians, we may safely leave our enemies to him." The good woman ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... necessary. We need it as a corrective of the tendency to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us to overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely, less hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... relative to the prison discipline, and other matters connected with it. In answer to a question addressed to him concerning the character of those under his charge, the overseer remarked in a tone of much self-complacency: ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... in the bottom of the boat, looking as miserable as possible, and quite sick, utterly forgetful or unconscious of the soiled condition of the splendid pina shirt which he wore at the time; although in his hours of ease it commonly attracted a large proportion of his regard and self-complacency. After many sips, apparently, the brandy produced the desired effect, as my follower ceased to project his mouth, every now and then, over the side of the banca, but had sunk into a sound sleep, caused, we imagined, by the exhaustion and lassitude subsequent to sea-sickness; and so he remained ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... Here, in June, 1763, Boswell came by solemn appointment to meet Johnson, so long the god of his idolatry. They had first met at the shop of Davis, the actor and bookseller, and afterwards near an eating-house in Butcher Row. Boswell describes his feelings with delightful sincerity and self-complacency. "We had," he says, "a good supper and port wine, of which Johnson then sometimes drank a bottle. The orthodox High Church sound of the Mitre, the figure and manner of the celebrated Samuel Johnson, the extraordinary power of his conversation, and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... he is the subject of them; not a record of a weakness appears, nor even a defect, except that which the Romans would readily forgive, cruelty. His savage waste of human life he recounts with perfect self-complacency. Vanity, the crowning error in his career as a statesman, though hidden by the reserve with which he speaks of himself, sometimes discovers itself ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... literature to which it gave birth. Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... the necessity of some prominent action that would still for ever his suspicions of incompetence, and would afford him a sure foundation on which to build his palace of self-complacency and personal appreciation. During his latter years he had regarded himself as his father's probable successor. Harry had seemed a very long way off in New Zealand, and became, eventually, an improbable myth, for Garrett had that happy quality ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... on Mr. Dodge, who turned over to one of his most elaborate strictures on the state of society in France, with all the self-complacency of besotted ignorance and provincial superciliousness. Searching out a place to his mind, this profound observer of men and manners, who had studied a foreign people, whose language when spoken was gibberish to him, by travelling five days in a public coach, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... awakening spirit of liberty, and who, as 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
... settle it to my great satisfaction, for, after no little effort, I succeeded in obtaining a plain view of the elusive little lyrist, and, sure enough, it proved to be the lazuli finch. Metaphorically I patted myself with a great deal of self-complacency, as I muttered: "The idea of Mr. Aiken's thinking I had so little discrimination! I know that hereafter I shall be able to detect the lazuli's peculiar intonations every time." So I walked home in a very self-confident frame of mind. A few days later I heard another song ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... performance he saw of John Bull's Other Island was boisterous. He loved to read that play as well as to see it performed. The glimpses of Ireland and the portraits of Irish character enchanted him. Broadbent—typifying the self-complacency of the well-meaning but Philistine Victorian who had solved to his own satisfaction all mysteries in earth and heaven—he regarded as a masterpiece of creative art. For Kipling his admiration was qualified; but he loved "M'Andrews' Hymn," and often recited lines from the "Recessional." Of the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... removed in full daylight. This resemblance was furthered by the fact that the man's profile was birdlike. He was clean-shaven, and there was in his sleek head and determined little face that smooth, compact self-complacency which is to be noted in ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... would have shaken his head, and perhaps remarked that they were a couple of foolish dreamers, that the light which inspired such splendid hopes was a light from the past—a dying twilight left in their souls by that sun of faith which for them had set. But there was nothing to disturb their pleasing self-complacency—no mocking skeleton to spoil their rare ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... reality but a small part of a minister's duty.' Nay, ministers, especially ministers of but a few twelvemonths' standing, have themselves in some cases caught up the remark, as if it embodied a self-evident truth; and while they dare tell, not without self-complacency, that their discourses—things written at a short sitting, if written at all—cost them but little trouble, they add further, as if by way of apology, that they are, however, 'much occupied otherwise, and that preaching is in reality but a small part of a minister's ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... of importance by asking too many questions of his inferiors, Captain Bonnet had bedecked himself a day too soon, and there were some jeers and sneers among his crew when he descended to his cabin to take off his fine clothes. But his self-complacency was well armoured, and he did not hear the jokes of which he was the subject, especially by the little clique of which Black Paul was the centre. But the sailing-master knew his business, and the Revenge was safely, though ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... brought him a blue envelope on a tray. He read it, and a frown gathered on his face. The boy who was translating at the time went on again in his former slipshod manner (which had hitherto provoked only jovial criticism and correction) with complete self-complacency, but found himself sternly brought to book, and burdened by a heavy imposition, before he quite realised that his ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter and soothe you back into self-complacency or conceit, you will be completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I "attribute unworthy motives" ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... reprobation should have been recorded against them in the indelible page. In the latter, who can bring a sanguine temperament of mind to the contemplation of the subject, the effect may be, and often is, unbounded confidence, leading to self-complacency and spiritual pride; the very natural result of believing that they are special objects of the love of God, and that their persuasion is a divine impulse, God speaking to the heart. Spiritual pride may assume the aspect of profound humility, and thus impose on its victim by ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... God?' He replied by the plain evangelical statement: 'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.' Why did He not answer the young ruler thus? Only because He knew that he needed to be led to that thought by having his own self-complacency shattered, and the clinging of his soul to earth laid bare. The whole treatment of him here is meant to bring him to the apprehension of faith as preceding all truly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... over, but another had yet to be waged against poverty and sordid environment; against the disabilities of birth; against the abuse of wealth; against the mutual suspicions of Capital and Labour; against sloth, indifference, self-complacency, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... tap-room of the village inn to ourselves, and for the first time in ten unspeakably long days were exempt from bodings and terrors and hardships and fatiguing labors. The Paladin was suddenly become his ancient self again, and was swaggering up and down, a very monument of self-complacency. Noel ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... feet and looked out beyond the easel with a smile that had no longer its origin in the fruition of the artist. Indeed, as he stood there, in his light, lax dress and the fulness of his youth, he had (his art apart) excuse for self-complacency. He was very pleasant to look upon, with an air of having always been popular with his fellows, and the favourite of women; this, too, was borne out by his history. Not a beautiful man, by any means, but the best type of English comeliness: ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... disdain, as she held the row of cottages in disdain. It seemed to her that Mr. Skellorn and the cottages mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness, their detestable self-complacency. Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered them with her scorn. The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... as "English by birth" and "English by blood." The new English, fresh from the Imperial island, seem to have usually conducted themselves with a haughty sense of superiority; the old English, more than half Hibernicized, confronted these strangers with all the self-complacency of natives of the soil on which they stood. In their frequent visits to the Imperial capital, the old English were made sensibly to feel that their country was not there; and as often as they went, they returned with renewed ardour to the land of their possessions ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... of all her offensiveness, and you prune her of half her evil. Let not your love of indulgence be so inordinate as to purchase short pleasure by impairing health, neglecting duty, or, while promoting your own self-complacency, allow yourself to become permanently revolting to society, by offending more senses as well as more principles ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... with less of patronizing self-complacency, struck the same note as the Times. The Economist attributed Lincoln's election to a shift in the sympathies of the "lower orders" in the electorate who had now deserted their former leaders, the slave-owning aristocracy ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance, of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... how to use them. Little Jack Gibson used to buy his paper and colours at a stationer's in Liverpool, who one day said to him kindly, "My lad, you're a constant customer here: I suppose you're a painter." "Yes, sir," Jack answered, with childish self-complacency, "I do paint." The stationer, who had himself studied at the Royal Academy, asked him to bring his pictures on view; and when Jack did so, his new friend, Mr. Tourmeau, was so much pleased with them ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant—an occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that there should be so huge a terrestrial ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... employment of a foreign word or phrase to express an idea which can be equally well couched in English is the cheapest sort of a literary trick, and it is the unmistakable badge of hopeless mediocrity and self-complacency. Expressions from other languages may be judiciously and legitimately used to give local color, and they are, of course, indispensable in the speeches of certain character types; but as a rule there is no better medium for your ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... which love has nothing to do, and it is a knowledge that for many people is quite sufficient. 'Knowledge puffeth up,' says the Apostle; into an unwholesome bubble of self-complacency that will one day be pricked and disappear, but 'love buildeth up'—a steadfast, slowly-rising, solid fabric. There be two kinds of knowledge: the mere rattle of notions in a man's brain, like the seeds of a withered poppy-head; very many, very dry, very hard; that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... I write of it not in self-complacency. My many blunders, some of them yet to be made, are a good insurance against that. I write because of the countless acres as good as mine, in this great, dear America, which might now be giving their owners all the healthful pastime, private solace, ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... her mortification within the curtains of her litter, and hastens home to solitude and tears. Here comes Barrus—as ugly a dog as any in Rome— dressed to death; and smiling Malvolio—smiles of self-complacency. The girls titter and exchange glances as he passes; Barrus swaggers on, feeling himself an inch taller in the conviction that he is slaughtering the hearts of the dear creatures by the score. A mule, with a dead boar thrown across it, now winds its way among the chariots and litters. A little ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... to have a small portion of good sense, with humility and a slender understanding, than great treasures of science, with vain self-complacency.—Thomas ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... gratify his malice at another's misfortune, under the pretext of pious reflections? Half-a-dozen times Julian had thought so, and thought so correctly. Hazlet's very little and very ignorant mind had been fed into self-complacency by the cheering belief that he and his friends formed a select party whose future welfare was secure, while "the world" was very wicked, and destined to everlasting burning; and in proportion to his gross conceit, was ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... Schiller, though he was in no danger of becoming a renegade on the main issue, had his moods of disgust, as Goethe and Herder had had before him, at the shallow self-complacency of the Age ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... is most active in visiting the houses of these outcasts from the means of grace, gives me an amusing instance of self-complacency arising from performance of the duty. She was visiting in the West Port, not far from the church established by my illustrious friend the late Dr. Chalmers. Having asked a poor woman if she ever attended there for divine service—"Ou ay," she replied; "there's a man ca'd Chalmers preaches ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... it,) is contemplating the picture of a bottle, which he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the print of Beer Street,—while we smile at the enormity of the self-delusion, can we help loving the good-humor and self-complacency of the fellow? would we willingly wake him ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—to roll off a log. A few days after the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... wretchedly off," he answered, moving backward and forward as he spoke; "and had it not been for the hostess," he added, with his air of vulgar self-complacency, "who is very agreeable and understands a joke, I should ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the transformation that follows, may well excite the pride of such a poet as Dante; though it is curious to see how he selects inventions of this kind as special grounds of self-complacency. They are the most appalling ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... self-defense. Such was one of the results of nineteenth-century evolutionism, and the generation that saw the last years of the nineteenth century and the first part of the new, basking in its day dreams of self-complacency, made no move to avert the dangers that threatened it then and now ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... as the foregoing—no misgivings suggested by them probably, troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute to it. It was merely a sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into convenient blocks, and worth, in that state, about two or three dollars ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... composition or criticism on composition. These two instances will, in some manner, explain my non-performance; but, indeed, I have been very ill, and that I have done anything in any way is a subject of wonder to myself, and of no causeless self-complacency. Yet I am anxious to do something which may convince you of my sincerity by zeal: and, if you think that it will be of any service to you, I will send down for the work; I will instantly give it a perusal 'con amore'; and partly by my reverential ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... with Mr. Reddie I recognised the real source of the amazing self-complacency displayed by the true paradoxist. The very insufficiency of the knowledge which a paradoxist possesses of his subject, affords the measure of his estimate of the care with which other men have studied that subject. Because the paradoxist is ready to pronounce an opinion about matters ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... guest who comes sometimes, as unbidden and unwelcome as a constable, to set all one's favorite vanities out of doors and evict one's self-complacency, had intruded upon her thoughts. Though she had the amelioration of a pier glass which gave her a view of all her beauty, from the coronal of burnished hair to the satin points of small slippers, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... prevents Jesus filling our cups as He passes by, and that is sin in one of its thousand forms. The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's spare time, sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defence when we are hurt or injured by others, self-consciousness, ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... painted a large canvas and revealed a grip on the essentials of characterisation. To Ibsen's An Enemy of the People he is evidently under certain obligations; Professor Bernhardi is a variation of Doctor Stockmann, plus not a little irony and self-complacency. But the thesis of Ibsen is less academic, sounder, of more universal interest than Schnitzler's. There is no metaphysical hair-splitting in An Enemy of the People, nor sentimental talk about euphoria and going happily to death. Grim old Daddy Ibsen told us ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... expectations are unfulfilled. But even when ample deduction has been made for these failures, the odds remaining in his favour are formidable, and will continue undiminished unless and until we realize our plight, shuffle off the cramping coils of conservatism, insularity and self-complacency and brace ourselves to the most strenuous, the most painful effort we have ever yet put forth. On our capacity to effect this inward change, rather than upon any diplomatic arrangements, depends the issue of the struggle which will begin when military and ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... from this secret of England's greatness, I detected a certain spontaneous self-complacency creeping over my soul, and slightly swelling my head; a certain placid cockiness not to be fully accounted for by the consciousness of birth, which naturally broadened as I approached Runnymede. I thereupon resolved myself into a committee ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... smoking posters left them at Salt hill, and that well-matched husband and wife sat down to their first boiled fowl, it would probably be a bathos to allude to angelic bliss; but they nevertheless were, and knew they were, the happiest of mortals. If any thing could add to Henry's self-complacency at that moment, it was the recollection of his own truly disinterested conduct; for only yesterday he had transferred all his little property to that kind and brotherly fellow John Dillaway, in trust for Maria Clements, should any possible reverse of fortune ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the two deposits on the bottom of a boiler, soot outside and crust inside, which keep the fire from getting at the water. They have lost their power because they are so familiar. They are weakened by not being practised. The very organs of intelligence are, as it were, ossified. Self-complacency lays hold on the possession of these ideas and shields itself against all appeals with the fact of possessing them. Many a man mistakes, in his own case, the knowledge of the truth for obedience to the truth. All this is seen in everyday life, and with reference ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... is, Herr Carovius had a weakness for association with aristocrats. In his heart of hearts he admired the manners of the aristocracy, their indifference and self-complacency, their irrefragable traditions and their noiseless and harmonious behaviour. To the pegs of the Academy he had affixed the names of some of the best families he had known; among others, those of the Tuchers, the Hallers, the Humbsers, the Kramer-Kleets, and the Auffenbergs. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... close: it is indeed one of the finest effects, climaxes, surprises, in literature. Caliban has been venturing to talk rather disrespectfully of his God; believing himself overlooked, he has allowed himself to speak out his mind on religious questions. He chuckles to himself in safe self-complacency. All ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Lieutenant Stewart," he said, when I had finished, "it was not self-complacency which urged me to take up the foils that day. I merely wished to show you that you had need to keep in practice, and so prevent you from ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... bravery on the battlefield of every war of the Republic where he "fell forward as fits a man." Munificent contributions of Christians and philanthropists, for missionary work abroad, are greatly in evidence, given with a self-complacency of duty done; but, however, fail to vivify the declining pulse-beat for equality before the law and justice at home. Manifestly there is an absence of that arraignment and condemnation of wrong done the weak, that contributed so largely to abolish the "corn laws of England" and slavery ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... But the parish church for a long time remained the only one at Mowbray when the population of the town exceeded that of some European capitals. And even in the parish church the frigid spell of Erastian self-complacency fatally prevailed. A scanty congregation gathered together for form, and as much influenced by party as higher sentiments. Going to church was held more genteel than going to meeting. The principal tradesmen of the ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... calculated to impair the attractions of her physiognomy, however prejudicial its effect might be upon the faces of the rest of the female part of the creation. In her countenance there was such an expression of blended affectation and self-complacency, that it was impossible to look upon it without feeling an inclination to smile. She was sitting near a prettily ornamented writing-desk, surmounted by a mirror (in which, by the way, she always found her greatest admirer), with her head reclining ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Venetian, but as his best work was executed during his sojourn in Venice, it will be more convenient to include him in the present chapter. Like so many others of the early printers, he regarded his own performances with no little self-complacency, for in his colophons he describes himself, "Vir solertissimus, imprimendi arte nominatissimus, artis impressori magister apprim famosus, perpolitus opifex, vir sub orbe notus," and so forth. To him is attributed ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... the same old hat—Freedom. But partly it's given to annoy the Unco Guid, as they pass to their Sabbath banquet of self-complacency. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... his mind; the sensorium indeed was capacious, and the sage imagined he saw the lucid beam, sparkling with love or ambition, in characters of fire, which a graceful curve of the upper eyelid shaded. The lips were a little deranged by contempt; and a mixture of vanity and self-complacency formed a few irregular lines round them. The chin had suffered from sensuality, yet there were still great marks of vigour in it, as if advanced with stern dignity. The hand accustomed to command, and even tyrannize, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... so it was with Job, Job xliii. 5, 6. "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear;" but as long as it was hearsay, I thought myself something,—I often reflected upon myself and actions, with a kind of self-complacency and delight; but now, saith he, since I have seen thee by the seeing of the eye, "I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes;" I cannot look upon myself with patience,—without abhorrency and detestation. Self-love made me loathe other men's sins more than mine ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... sensibly since his reputation had elevated him into polite society; and he was constantly endeavoring by the aid of dress to acquire that personal acceptability, if we may use the phrase, which nature had denied him. If ever he betrayed a little self-complacency on first turning out in a new suit, it may perhaps have been because he felt as if he had achieved a triumph over ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... people inhabiting the country from Maeonians to Lydians—a change which to the keen sense of an historical critic implies a conquest of one race by another. But to the people themselves this tradition conveyed no such meaning; or, if it did to any, their self-complacency was not disturbed thereby, since they would hug the notion that they belonged not to the conquered race but to the conquerors. If a Ramcsos or a Sesostris had ever penetrated to their country, he had ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... I always make trouble?" she said, with plaintive self-complacency. "Rachel, you must not be jealous of me. I ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... whispered to me that the biscuits were spoiled, and then her face settled into an expression of stony peace. When Mrs. Jameson finally closed her book there was a murmur which might have been considered expressive of relief or applause, according to the amount of self-complacency of the reader. Mrs. Jameson evidently considered it applause, for she bowed in a highly gracious manner, and remarked: "I am very glad if I have given you pleasure, ladies, and I shall be more than pleased at some future time to read some other selections even superior to these ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour. It is a powerful corrective to such a very rational cause of fear if the inferior body can be made to believe that the party inclination, or political views, of several in the principal state will ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... feelings, and can preach very edifying sermons to his less scrupulous friend Nightingale, requires to be cast in a different mould. His whole character should have been strung to a higher pitch to make us feel that such degradation would not merely have required punishment to restore his self-complacency, but have left a craving for ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... least arouses pride and energy. To be sure, in the face of history, the contemptuous tone in regard to women seems to me untrue, unfair, and dastardly; but, like any other extreme injustice, it leads to reaction. It helps to awaken women from that shallow dream of self-complacency into which flattery lulls them. There is something tonic in the manly arrogance of Fitzjames Stephen, who derides the thought that the marriage contract can be treated as in any sense a contract between equals; but there ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was ever more fortunate in a wife than I shall be," he said, with a soft, euphuistic self-complacency, which would have been silly had it been adopted to any other person than the bride's brother. His intention, however, was very good, for he meant to show, that in his case marriage was prudent and wise, because his case differed so widely from that ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... was mortified he had not and never could obtain a literary peerage; and he never respected the commoner's seat. At these moments, too frequent in his life, he contemns authors, and returns to sink back into all the self-complacency of aristocratic indifference. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... a tone of speaking about one's past savours of an earlier stage in revelation than that in which we live, and, if this were to be taken as a man's total account of his whole life, we could not free it from the charge of unpleasing self-complacency and self- righteousness. But for all that, it is not the same thing in the retrospect whether you and I have to look back upon years that have been given to self, and the world, and passion, and pride, and covetousness, and frivolities and trifles ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... only does the evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and to keep their sense of his importance alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's self-complacency. In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is comforted and upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and by exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his habitual standard of decency, either ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... sincere, and his slight sympathy had that irresistible quality of tone and look which made him so dangerous. For he was struck with the pretty, soothed self-complacency that had shone in her face since he had spoken of Pendleton's equal disinterestedness. It seemed, too, as if what he had taken for passion or petulance in her manner had been only a resistance to some continual aggression of condition. With that remainder held in check, a certain ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Van Beverout was not easily disturbed. Still there was a play of the nether muscles of the face, which might be construed into self-complacency at his victory, while a certain contraction of those which controlled the expression of the forehead seemed to betray a full consciousness of the imminent risk he had run. The left hand was thrust into ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... idea of the Aufklaerung that Christianity was nothing more than a code of morals, has now long ago been given up, and the self-complacency which characterised that movement has for the most part, though not entirely, passed away. The nineteenth century is not in very many quarters regarded as the goal of things. And it will hardly now ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday |
