"Self-complacency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only to be described as heavenly. The thought of the Colonel, of how he would have enjoyed this snug room and roaring fire, and of his cold grave in the wood by Market Bosworth, lingered on my palate, amari aliquid, like an after-taste, but was not able—I say it with shame—entirely to dispel my self-complacency. After all, in this world every dog hangs by its own tail. I was a free adventurer, who had just brought to a successful end—or, at least, within view of it—an adventure very difficult and alarming; and I looked across at Mr. Dudgeon, as the port rose to his cheeks, and a smile, that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mortals, we poets are most subject to contrary moods. Now, heaven over heaven in the skies; now layer under layer in the dust. This, the penalty we pay for being what we are. But Mardi only sees, or thinks it sees, the tokens of our self-complacency: whereas, all our agonies operate unseen. Poets are only seen ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... of modest self-complacency as the girl now approached him. "Bonjour, M. Frederic! Ah, mon Dieu! how thin you have grown! You have ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"—and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... we have performed any extraordinary acts of self-denial, or of Christian beneficence, he stirs up in our hearts a vain-glorious spirit. If we have overcome any of the corruptions of our hearts, or any temptation, he excites a secret feeling of self-satisfaction and self-complacency. He puts on the mask of religion. Often, during the solemn hours of public worship, he beguiles our hearts with some scheme for doing good; taking care, however, that self be uppermost in it. When we are in a bad frame, he stirs up the unholy tempers ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... awoke from his idolatrous dream. He brought Nellie to a seat and sat awkwardly beside her. His old self-complacency had left him. Nellie was talking to him, but he did not hear what she said. He was not looking at her, but at himself. Before he knew it she had left him and was dancing with Jim Russell. Tom looked after them, miserable. She was looking into Jim's face, smiling and talking. What the ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... 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
... 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 some thorough ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... indicate by appropriate and spontaneous action the deep and intense interest they take in the verdict.—KARL gasps and faints, and is supported by HAROLD and CORPORAL.—WEDGEWOOD notices the tableau with great self-complacency—[The whole action is simultaneous]—KARL is borne off by HAROLD and CORPORAL. All the CHARACTERS then turn, and by looks and actions congratulate each other, and the scene instantly becomes one of ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... strayed beyond the jobs of the day, and they were glad of it. Their mother was one of those shrunken, faded patterns of woman who have never done anything to keep smooth the cheek and dignify the brow. The father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness, and entire self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... also 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 have got a ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was inclined to be jealous. He thought the foal was a new kind of dog and a rival. Then when he understood that after all the little creature was only an animal, on a different and a lower plane, to be patronised and bullied and ragged, he resumed his self-complacency. Thoroughly human, a vulgar sense of superiority kept his temper sweet. He accepted Four-Pound-the-Second as one to whom he might extend his patronage and his protection. And once this was understood the relations between the foal and the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... an' I make mo dan you tink, an' a heap mo' dan I let Unc. know about. He'd be fer settin' up his kerrige ef he knew," and she again laughed in hearty self-complacency. "Why, honey, I can 'sport you an' Missus widout pinchin', an' who gwine ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... laughed gaily, dipped 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
... professed misogynist, 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 world: follow her course through ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... intelligent, and well off. They will stand, as it were, the centre of the world, between the two great oceans, with Europe on one hand and Asia on the other. With such a future before him, we must pardon the Yankee if we find a little dash of self-complacency in his composition; and bear with the surprise and annoyance which he expresses at finding that we know so little of himself or of his country. Our humble opinion is that we ought ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... 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 have worded ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... violence to my understanding in praising this unnatural rhapsody, I nevertheless extolled it as a production that of itself deserved immortal fame; and besought her ladyship to bless the world with the fruits of those uncommon talents Heaven had bestowed upon her. She smiled with a look of self-complacency, and encouraged by the incense I had offered, communicated all her poetical works which I applauded, one by one, with as little candour as I had shown at first. Satiated with my flattery, which I hope my situation justified, she could not in conscience ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... shallow," thought Mollie sorrowfully, and then suddenly inverted the sentence. "Am I shallow?" she asked herself, with an uneasy doubt creeping over her self-complacency. "I expect I am, for I am content with the surface of things, and like to laugh better than to think. But I'm twenty; I don't want to be treated as a child all my life. It's horrid of him to ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 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 slowly, sailed among the coral-reefs ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... has only to wish for a thing to get it becomes closed in fifty years. It mistakes desire for right. It regards opposition as sacrilege. Other minds that differ from it are wicked because they differ. The thick armor of Prince Karl's self-complacency had been pierced as it were by a tiny needle that stung, however tiny, as if its point were ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... contrast between the confident hopes of the patrician leaders at Pharsalia and the luxury of their camp with the overwhelming disaster which fell upon them. About himself and his own exploits there is not one word of self-complacency or self-admiration. In his writings, as in his life, Caesar is always the same—direct, straightforward, unmoved save by occasional tenderness, describing with unconscious simplicity how the work which had been forced upon him was accomplished. He wrote with extreme rapidity in the intervals of ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... kingdom of heaven meant exclusive privileges, and their rule over the heathen. They had all but lost the thought that it meant first God's rule over their wills, and their harmony with the glad obedience of heaven. They had to be rudely shaken out of their self-complacency and taught that the livery of the King was purity, and the preparation for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Alice there, and come up to the hill-country. Dear father! he was offering me a lump of sugar after the bitter medicine, and I accepted it, sure at least of a momentary sweet sensation, and very sure that my poor father felt comforted by the self-complacency flowing from the enormous sacrifice he was making in coming up to the highlands at this cold season. My sister was glad enough to get a holiday from her nursery, so, on Monday, the second of October, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... there never is any negligence in my company, and so my conscience was at ease. I came forward...." (Berg stood up and showed how he presented himself, with his hand to his cap, and really it would have been difficult for a face to express greater respect and self-complacency than his did.) "Well, he stormed at me, as the saying is, stormed and stormed and stormed! It was not a matter of life but rather of death, as the saying is. 'Albanians!' and 'devils!' and 'To Siberia!'" said Berg with a sagacious smile. "I knew ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 obliged ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... sort of a grandmother to us,' said Eugene. 'What a good thing,' with extreme self-complacency, 'I made you go in!—what a good thing I ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... first of them must be {59} this,—that somehow he has been made open-minded to the good. It may be that the conceit has been, as we say, knocked out of him, and that he has been "taken down." Well! it is better to be taken down than to be still up or "uppish." It is better to have the self-complacency knocked out of you than to have it left in. Humility, as Henry Drummond once said, even when it happens through humiliation, is a blessing. Not to the Pharisee with his "I am not as other men are," but to the publican crying ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... 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, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of thought, his sarcasms assumed a garb at once so courtly and so careless, that they often diverted almost as much as they could mortify even their immediate objects. His humorous reproof to a gentleman vaunting with self-complacency the extreme beauty of his mother, and apparently implying that it might account for advantages in person in her descendants, is well known: 'Cetait donc,' said he, 'Monsieur votre pere qui n'etait pas si bien.' The following is more recent, but the humor ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... regard as culture in the old Eastern life, the jargon of the colleges, the smattering of things talked about, the tricks and turns of trained motions and emotions; but there was a difference. There was no pretence. There was none of the fire-proof self-complacency—Self-sufficiency, she had, but not self-righteousness. Then, most striking contra-distinction of all to the old-land culture, there was unconsciousness of self—face to sunlight, radiant of the joy of life, not anaemic and putrid of its own egoism. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... From the loss of our glory in Thee, From self-complacency, From untimely projects, From needless perplexity, From the murdering spirit and devices of Satan, From the influence of the spirit of this world, From hypocrisy and fanaticism, From the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... tedious and egoistic, 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 vouchsafed to ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... 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 in us all?" "I suppose so," ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... as she walked homeward; it seemed that she had regained, in a measure, some peace of mind, and as she prepared dinner for her father and her child, she was almost cheerful. A warm glow of self-complacency enveloped her. Later, when old Caleb and the boy had retired and she sat before the little wood fire alone with her thoughts, this feeling of self-conscious rectitude slowly left her, and into its place crept a sense of desolation inspired by one thought that obtruded upon her ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... each in his own way: Mr. Donne with a stilted self-complacency and half-sullen phlegm, the sole props of his otherwise somewhat rickety dignity; Mr. Sweeting with the indifference of a light, easy disposition, which never professed to have any dignity ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he's not even a happy man ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... is usually supposed if you would attain exact precision. There are operations of extreme length in which I have sometimes seen good geometricians lose themselves. Reflection, assisted by practice, gives clear ideas, and enables you to devise shorter methods, these inventions flatter our self-complacency, while their exactitude satisfies our understanding, and renders a study pleasant, which is, of itself, heavy and unentertaining. At length I became so expert as not to be puzzled by any question that was solvable by arithmetical ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... time or other—within a year, I imagine,' said Mr. Calton, with an air of great self-complacency. 'We may have ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor, and imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental astuteness; and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on the countenances of the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces; and among the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... the asperities of man, and polish the naturally rugged surface of his character; charming away his sternness by her grace; refining his coarseness by her elegance and purity; and offering in her smiles a reward sufficient to compensate for the hazards of any enterprise. But while the self-complacency and vanity of many of our sex have been nourished by such idle praise, how few have been awakened to a just sense of the deep responsibility which rests upon us, for the faithful improvement of this talent, and our consequent accountability for ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... so certain of this," she observed, shaking her white head slowly as she spoke, and, lifting a pinch of snuff from her tortoise-shell box (the companion of her whole married life, as she acquainted us), she inhaled it with an air of meditative self-complacency, then offered it quietly to the gentlemen, who were still sitting over their wine and peaches; passing by Marion, Alice Durand, and myself, completely, in ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... encountered during this invigorating holiday may be found in "The Emigrant," a light, sketchy, and most readable little volume put forth by Sir Francis ten years afterwards. Soon after his return to the Seat of Government his self-complacency received a check in the form of a despatch from the Colonial Office, enclosing copies of instructions which had been sent to Sir Archibald Campbell, Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick. It appeared ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... 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 ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... ROYAL apartment, decorated in superlative grandeur, sat the powerful monarch of Chaldea. He was alone. His countenance bespoke a degree of self-complacency and satisfaction. Around him, on a rich carpet, were several large scrolls of manuscript, while, in his hand, he held carelessly what appeared to be a well-arranged map of battle fields and grand points of attack. Chaldea, at this time, was the seat of science and learning. Thither ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... of her remorse, at his not being as miserable as she had expected. Still, if he had overcome the passion, it was so much better for him. But yet Valencia hardly wished that he should have overcome it, so self-contradictory is woman's heart; and her pity had sunk to half-ebb, and her self-complacency was rising with a flowing tide, as he chatted on quietly, but genially, about the voyage, and the scenery, and Snowdon, which he had never seen, and which he ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... scenes, which were intended for comic, Dr Johnson has said, "they are such as that age did not probably commend, and as the present would not endure." Dryden has remarked, with self-complacency, the art with which they are made to depend upon the serious business. This has not, however, the merit of novelty; being not unlike the connection between the tragic and comic scenes of the "Spanish Friar." The persons introduced have also some resemblance; though the gaiety of Antonio is ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... University, and then its president. As Governor, he had commended himself by fighting the Machine, and by advocating radical measures. As candidate, he asserted his independence by declaring that "a party platform is not a program." He spoke effectively, and both he and his party had the self-complacency that comes to persons who believe that they are sure to win. And how could their victory be in doubt since the united Democrats had for opponents the divided Republicans? When Colonel Roosevelt was shot, Governor Wilson magnanimously announced that he would make no more ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... 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 questions. They were tired of their employment; ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was of course Miss Bart's. The young lady was treated by her hosts with corresponding deference; and she was in the mood when such attentions are acceptable, whatever their source. Mrs. Bry's admiration was a mirror in which Lily's self-complacency recovered its lost outline. No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity; and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power. If these people paid court to her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... any sort are apt to generate, not only a wholesome esprit de corps, but a hostile contempt for outsiders, and Christianity has too often been misrepresented by its professors, who have looked down upon those that are without with supercilious and unchristian self-complacency. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make 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 in panic. He began to scream editorially. The Southern extremists ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... self-conscious, while his vis-a-vis, though smiling and apparently at ease, was yet alert and excited,—darting furtive glances, that would have startled him like flashes of sunlight reflected from a mirror, if he had not been shielded by his own self-complacency. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... with wonderful skill, that praise and blame are deftly mingled, and that the satire is all the more severe because of its frank admission of the great man's merits. And it must also be said that Pope has hit off some of the faults of Addison's character,—his coldness, his self-complacency, his quiet sneer, his indulgence of flattering fools—in a way that none of his biographers have done. That Pope was not blind to Addison's chief merit as an author is fully shown by a passage in a later poem, less well known than the ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... Newman and Pusey. He prophesied that they would come to no good. He called them 'silly boys;' and he looks uneasily at the crowds who throng before this year's picture of the Huguenot Couple—not recovering his self-complacency until his eye catches his own favourite work, when he feels himself gradually mollified, and smiles anew upon ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... annual caravan of wealthy planters to visit the watering places, and inhabit the great hotels of the North. Coming in intimate contact with the superior classes of our own population; floating up in the atmosphere of serene self-complacency; radiating, shedding down upon those with whom they chanced to associate, the ineffable consciousness of their own unquestionable superiority; they have communicated without effort on their part, and without ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 mischief ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... by her as her due; there were no quick flushes of pleasure or surprise at any little mark of kindness or attention; no disclaiming of any compliment which was paid her as exaggerated or undeserved; the smile of perfect self-complacency sat on her face, and gave ease to her every action and every speech. She never hesitated in giving her opinion; she never qualified or withdrew it when given. She knew herself to be perfectly well-informed and perfectly well-bred. She felt herself to be Mr. ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... turban with both hands, thus unhappily exposing some tufts of frosty gray that had managed to creep, year after year, into her wool. After this rather abrupt toilet, she drew herself up with a grand air, and marched forward to receive the strangers in a glorious state of self-complacency. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... 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 became one of the most ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating foot. Whenever a sufficient pressure from without parted the fog of self-complacency in which he moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on men and motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst's answer had effected this ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... 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
... self-exaltation, assumption, presumption, self-respect, conceit, reserve, superciliousness, disdain, self-complacency, vainglory, haughtiness, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... officers of the regular army to speak of it as "the army." As the greatest cities are most provincial, so the self-complacency of aristocracies ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... anybody was here, of course. Our PARTY"—she emphasized the word, and accompanied it with a look toward the further extremity of the plateau, to show she was not alone—"our party climbed this ridge, and put up this pole as a sign to show they did it." The ridiculous self-complacency of this record in the face of a man who was evidently a dweller on the mountain apparently struck her for the first time. "We didn't know," she stammered, looking at the shaft from which Rand had emerged, "that—that—" She stopped, and, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fat servant-woman, engaged in cleaning a stair. She was steaming 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, "I am perfectly satisfied so you don't bake ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... exertions affairs had been placed in 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... them and the carriage moved away. She was one of those fortunate persons who never see themselves as others see them, but move through existence surrounded by a halo, or a haze, of self-complacency, through which their perception cannot penetrate. The charitable were ready to testify that there was no harm in her. Hers was merely one of a million lives in which man can find no fault and ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... man, ruined by his own self-complacency, merely smiled in his superior manner, not noticing the eager look with which Doyle ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... upon me as I passed 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 turned again ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... out that both wolf and panther—hungry vulpine prowler and sleek feminine soft-footed enemy—gathered closely, around the young British Lion, whose easy self-complacency led him into the snare, hoodwinked by the fair ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... 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
... again quite 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 ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... men of obedience to the sceptre of genius. Here a pompous form of diction is taught in an age when every spoken or written word is a piece of barbarism. Now let us consider, besides, the danger of arousing the self-complacency which is so easily awakened in youths; let us think how their vanity must be flattered when they see their literary reflection for the first time in the mirror. Who, having seen all these effects at one glance, could any longer doubt whether all the faults of our public, literary, and artistic ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... CO., I had very frequent recourse to them when in need of such solace as 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 book which showed my takings was so clear and easily to be understood, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... if one has any sense, to talk of oneself to people that inquire only out of compliment, and do not listen to the answer, the more satisfaction one feels in indulging a self-complacency, by sighing to those that really sympathise with our griefs. Do not think it is pain that makes me give this low-spirited air to my letter. No, it is the prospect of what is to come, not the sensation of what is passing, that affects me. The loss of youth is melancholy enough; but to enter into ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... hour in replying to the many questions put to him, 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
... determining influence on his intellectual development. Till he met Herder he had been treated as a youthful genius, as a "conquering lord," whose eccentricities were only a proof of his originality. Very different was the measure he received from Herder, who showed no mercy for "whatever of self-complacency, egotism, vanity, pride and presumption was latent or active" in him. Herder, he says elsewhere, "exercised such a blighting influence on me that I began to doubt my own powers." Whether or not Goethe learned from Herder the lesson of modesty regarding ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... velveteen dress, with a new pale-yellow hair ribbon, she waited about in her usual agonies of stage fright. Learning from Dr. Linton, however improving it might be to her touch, was hardly conducive to self-complacency, and, after having suffered much vituperation for her imperfect rendering of a piece, it was decidedly appalling to have to play it in public, especially with the horrible possibility that at any moment her master might happen to pop in to view the exhibition and arrive ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... 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
... I read the evening blessing aloud by lamp-light, without faltering or stammering. Indeed she felt so edified that she gave over to me forever the office of reader, the duties of which I hereafter performed for a considerable length of time with much zeal and not without self-complacency. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... in Modern Oxford, attempts to re-establish those local connections, which the wisdom of our ancestors established, and which the self-complacency of Victorian ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... golden guineas, and society caught him in its silken mesh. Success came faster than he was able to endure it, and he fell a victim to fatty degeneration of the cerebrum, and died of an acute attack of self-complacency. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... to such 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 was ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Burton, the American actor, was in his "trouble," a young lawyer was examining him as to how he had spent his money. There was about three thousand pounds unaccounted for, when the attorney put on a severe scrutinizing face, and exclaimed, with much self-complacency,—"Now, sir, I want you to tell this court and jury how you used those three thousand pounds." Burton put on one of his serio-comic faces, winked at the audience, and exclaimed, "The lawyers got that!" The judge and audience were convulsed with laughter. The counsellor was glad ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... mind not unusual to him after a call upon Miss Mott, from whose house he was apt to come away so ruffled and irritated that nothing short of a counteracting feminine influence could restore his self-complacency. ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... the extreme self-complacency with which he asserts that he is very handsome and will never become blue and no one with him is ever lonely. As before stated, white signifies peace and happiness, while blue is the emblem of sorrow ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... and manner; she 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 husbands of his acquaintance; ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... beautiful hands, and 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the publican and harlots, his attitude was of pure compassion. Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory. Wealth of ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath which broke in lightning-flashes. "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones, children ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... avenging visitation, and to perish in it? In all times, the triflers with the great exemplifications of the connection of depravity with misery and ruin, who thought it but an impertinent moralizing that attempted to recall such funereal spectacles for admonition, were fools, whatever self-complacency they might feel in a habit of thinking more fitted, they would perhaps say, for making our best advantage of the world as we find it. And we of the present time are convicted of exceeding stupidity, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... remarked that those whom she thus 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 best dancers, and ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... drive me to despair, though I was sure this to be their aim. They simply aroused my fighting blood. All other thoughts for the future were forgotten, buried under the repeated vow that I would repay Gladys Todd a thousand times for this momentary coldness and would deal a stinging blow to Boller's self-complacency. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... in his dress, and has such red hair, and straight at that; and Mike pushes his fingers through the bright curls, and gives another look at himself in the little mirror that hangs in his room in the stable. The self-complacency melts away, as the object becomes dearer, and there is a slight fear that some obstacle may spring up between him and his hopes. He'll risk but he can overcome it, though, but it would be pleasanter to have the way smooth and easy. There's Molly Ryan would give her right hand for him, and Katie ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... the world was against such refusal. Towns 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
... majesty of the law. He was not patient of injustice because a court of justice was its source. He had the audacity to speak, think, and write, as if he were entitled to canvass affairs of State. From his gaol he became audible in the recesses of the Palace. He troubled the self-complacency of its master by teaching his consort and his heir-apparent ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... associations. Sometimes he indulges to such an extent in his sin, that the main substance of his speech is swearing. It is more than an adjunct or concomitant of his conversation; it is the body and soul of it. Sometimes you may hear him, with an air of self-complacency, give utterance to his profanity, as though he regarded it an ornament of rhetoric, giving spice and condiment to his thoughts. There are occasions when he considers his talk only reliable in its truthfulness as this evil accompanies ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... snares, Self-seeking men, by ignorance deluded, Strive by unrighteous means to pile up riches. Then, in their self-complacency, they say, "This acquisition I have made to-day, That will I gain to-morrow, so much pelf Is hoarded up already, so much more Remains that I have yet to treasure up. This enemy I have destroyed, him also, And others in their ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... 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
... 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; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the making of this modern mood of self-complacency. New knowledge has helped, by which disasters, such as once awakened our fathers' poignant sense of sin, are now attributed to scientific causes rather than to human guilt. When famines or pestilences came, our fathers thought them God's punishment for sin. When earthquakes shook the earth or ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... an honest and fearless tongue. She was an itinerant tailoress, and having worked, first and last, in nearly every family in the town, she knew the circumstances of them all, and knew too well the connection of Robert Belcher with their troubles and reverses. In Mr. Belcher's present condition of self-complacency and somnolency, she was not a welcome visitor. Belligerent as he had been toward his own image in the mirror, he shrank from meeting Keziah Butterworth, for he knew instinctively that she had come ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... 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 of inquiry, and, applying the analytical system ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... German rather than 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 the credit of having ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... 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 ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... gave a higher bound. He was going to "escort" her home, of course! This brilliant youth—she felt now that he WAS brilliant—who dined alone with married women, whom the "Van Degen set" called "Ralphie, dear," had really no eyes for any one but herself; and at the thought her lost self-complacency flowed back ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... own hand, unless it be the three natural aces at brag?" Can comedy be finer than this? Has not every person some Matthews and James in their acquaintance—one all passion, and the other all indifference and vapid self-complacency? James, the good-natured fellow, with passions and without principles: Bath, with his magnificent notions of throat-cutting and the Christian religion, what admirable knowledge of the world do all these characters display: ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... 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 her countenance. ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... patiently awaiting the inevitable moment when she would look at him again. So far, she had pretended to ignore him, but he understood her tactics, and as he observed them, he twisted first one end and then the other of his little light moustache, with a self-complacency not to be concealed. He had been feeling bored all the morning, but now his interest in life revived. He had only the one interest in life, and when the girl on the beach had done all she could to excite ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Harry Glen's perfect self-complacency did not molt a feather when the victors returned to camp flushed with their triumph, which, in the eyes of those inexperienced three-months men, had the dimensions of Waterloo. He did not know that in proportion as they magnified their ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... "But his self-complacency did not last long. It was that very class to which he belonged, that the preacher addressed. He exposed the cunning temptations of Satan, and told how he labored to lead even those who hated vice, to join in the pleasures of the world, without requiring them ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... With that genial self-complacency, which sits so well on him, Hyde records that he took his seat in the House of Lords as Lord Chancellor (but not a peer) "with a general acceptation and respect." He found on the benches round him those who had been ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... godmother and 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 ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... you—if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fulness thereof. But if, on the other hand, it is petty self-complacency in your own skill, trust in precepts and laws, hope for academical or popular approbation, or avarice of wealth,—it is quite possible that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance, you may win the ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... German factory worker of 37, a good, sober and intelligent workman. His parents were healthy, but one of his mother's and also one of his father's sisters were insane; some of his relatives are eccentric in religion. He has a languishing expression and a smile of self-complacency. He never had any severe illness, but has always been eccentric and imaginative, much absorbed in romances (such as Dumas's novels) and fond of identifying himself with their heroes. No signs of epilepsy. In youth ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... lighthouse keeper. In a worldly point of view, therefore, was it wisely done that I should have set my affections upon her? Possibly not; and it is likely that, had I known the weakness of my mind, I would have shunned the danger from the very first. But I was gay and reckless in my poor self-complacency and deceitful assurance of inner strength; and long before I had fairly realized how rapidly I was drifting, I found myself whirling down the swift current, and was lost. Nor was it a marvel that this should have so happened. To one who sits aloof ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard struggles with objective difficulty and external ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 to regenerate the world; science, that ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... 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 velvet dress that ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... 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 boy could ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... the audience in good humour—they laughed incontinently—clapped and shouted bravo, and Wignell proceeded with his usual stateliness, self-complacency, and composure. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • 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 ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... Self-complacency.—His complacency would excite profound admiration did it not betoken deadline inaction. He became becalmed on the sea of life years ago, but does not know it. When the procession of life moves past ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... 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 Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... his uniform even after the custom of several years—emerges f rom those passages; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years, and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick sidewalk, cane in hand—a vision of serene self-complacency and so plainly the expression of virtuous public sentiment that the great colored louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken with a sudden sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... 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 bestowed on ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... 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 ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... 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 ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... obsolescent words, and close-mouthed stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with their grim and undemonstrative hospitality. Already are the railroads displacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the dogged self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip circling than round a coffin. Let ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sacred store, or having given it to their parents 'to keep,' over whose minds the remembrance of the secret hoard every now and then sends flashing across the mind of the child a sense of importance, or richness, or a general self-complacency which varies with the individuality. Boys and girls in the next stages of their growth care little and think little about money, except as a means of obtaining some trifling passing indulgence. The childish reverence for the pose has passed. The unopenable box has been long since opened, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... people say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of the green-room, Canalis "dragged the time." He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors call "balancoires,"—the picturesque phrase of an artistic people. Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... who was somebody in Ireland, who was a great person in Dublin, found himself nobody in England, a mere cipher in London, Looked down upon by the fine people with whom his lady associated, and heartily weary of them, he retreated from them altogether, and sought entertainment and self-complacency in society beneath him—indeed, both in rank and education, but in which he had the satisfaction of feeling himself the first person in company. Of these associates, the first in talents, and in jovial profligacy, was Sir Terence O'Fay—a ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... my present disquisition relates to the feeling of self-approbation or self-complacency, which will be found inseparable from the most honourable efforts and exertions in which ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... the sea and the rain. It was altogether a bright and beautiful world he had got into, and there was in it but one woman, beautiful beyond his dreams. To doubt her was to doubt all women. When he looked at her he forgot the caution and distrust and sardonic self-complacency his southern training had given him. He believed, and the world seemed to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... exertions, not by the promise of specific rewards, or by the threats of any punishment, but by the ardent ambition which they inspire, by the high value which is set upon their love and esteem. When we have formed a high opinion of a friend, his approbation becomes necessary to our own self-complacency, and we think no labour too great to satisfy our attachment. Our exertions are not fatiguing, because they are associated with all the pleasurable sensations of affection, self-complacency, benevolence, and liberty. These feelings, in ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Power of God in him, alike seem not so much to banish as utterly to preclude any thought about himself but that of his own imperfection. He writes as one whose very last feeling is that of complacency in his spiritual condition. I deliberately do not say "self-complacency"; for all Christians would repudiate that word; I say, complacency in his spiritual condition. His spiritual position, in Christ, as he is "found in Him," fills him with much more than complacency; it is his glory and his boast. ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... is 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 of the worship ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... pursuits, by assigning the highest possible value to his actual performance. Additional strength will be given to these dispositions by the impressions of his personal character. This was, indeed, such as to conciliate the utmost good-will. If we except occasional touches of self-complacency, which betray, perhaps, a trifling foible, it may be said that everything is pleasing which is known concerning him. His devotion, wellnigh heroic, to scholarly aims; his quiet studiousness; his filial virtue; his genial sociability, graced by, and gracing, the self-supporting habit of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that they detect a little grain of self-complacence. Something of self-consciousness is perhaps inevitable in the diary and examination of his own conscience by one who sat on such a lonely height; but self-complacency there is none. Nay, there is sometimes even a cruel sternness in the way in which the Emperor speaks of his own self. He certainly dealt not with himself in the manner of a dissembler with God. "When," he says (x. 8), "thou hast assumed the names ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... new importance, the valet hastily left the room, his self-complacency increased by the thought that he was to breakfast with M. Isidore Fortunat, and would afterward share a fat commission with ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... aspire after virtue, because many behave as if they placed it barely in multiplying exercises of piety and good works. This costs little to self-love, which it rather feeds by entertaining a secret vanity, or self-complacency, in those who are not very careful in watching over their hearts. It is a common thing to see persons who have passed forty or fifty years in the constant practice of penance and all religious exercises, and the use of the most holy sacraments, still ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... me, 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 with him; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... pride must have a fall, and there came an episode in Miss Sommerton's career as an artist which was a rude shock to her self-complacency. Having purchased a landscape by a celebrated artist whose work she had long admired, she at last ventured to write to him and enclose some of her own sketches, with a request for a candid judgment of them—that is, she said she wanted a ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... fell short of all this platitude, it was no fault of the really affecting folly of her attempt to become a mere magazine mortal after the only fashion she had made out, to the intensification of her self-complacency, that ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... fell upon me; he included me in his bow—that was all. All my little day-dream of growing self-complacency was shattered, scattered; the old feeling of soreness, smallness, wounded pride, and bruised self-esteem came back again. I felt a wild, angry desire to compel some other glance from those eyes than that exasperating ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... cannot find it in his heart to take any but the most round-about way of doing so; but he is never disconcerted by any of the untoward results of his schemes, and relates to Cnemon, with the most perfect self-complacency, the deceit which he had practiced on his confiding host, Charicles, in helping Theagenes to steal away his adopted daughter, and the various scrapes into which his proteges had fallen under his guidance. He has, moreover, pet theories of his own on the phenomena of the Nile, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... After a few moments' chat, John Dashwood, recollecting that Fanny was yet uninformed of her sister's being there, quitted the room in quest of her; and Elinor was left to improve her acquaintance with Robert, who, by the gay unconcern, the happy self-complacency of his manner while enjoying so unfair a division of his mother's love and liberality, to the prejudice of his banished brother, earned only by his own dissipated course of life, and that brother's integrity, was confirming her most unfavourable ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... knew that her independence was owing to the delicate generosity of Obed Chute, and that under any other circumstances she would probably have had no refuge from starvation; but her gratitude to her friends did not lesson at all her own self-complacency. There was a childish delight in Zillah over her new position, which was due, perhaps, to the fact that she had always looked upon herself as hopelessly and incurably dull; but now the discovery that she could actually fill the position of music-teacher brought her a strange triumph, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... 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 the notion ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... to tears,—some, I doubt not, to a better life. I never felt such sympathy with an audience;—as I looked over that sea of faces marked with the traces of every ill, I felt that at least heavenly truth would not be kept out by self-complacency and ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the First, invented the devices; composed the procession of the Masquers and the Anti-Masquers; while one took the care of the dancing or the brawlers, and Whitelocke the music—the sage Whitelocke! who has chronicled his self-complacency on this occasion, by claiming the invention of a Coranto, which for thirty years afterwards was the delight of the nation, and was blessed by the name of "Whitelocke's Coranto," and which was always called for, two or ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli |
