"Self-satisfaction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slender; Gorby was short and stout. Kilsip looked clever; Gorby wore a smile of self-satisfaction; which alone was sufficient to prevent his doing so. Yet, singularly enough, it was this very smile that proved most useful to Gorby in the pursuit of his calling. It enabled him to come at information where his sharp-looking colleague might ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... deliberate result of experience and observation. M—— told me, after dining with Dickens immediately on his return, that one thing that had disgusted him was the almost universal want of conscience upon money matters in America; and the levity, occasionally approaching to something like self-satisfaction, for their "sharpness," which he had repeated occasions of observing, in your people when speaking of the present disgraceful condition of their finances and deservedly degraded state of their national credit.... ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of no particular color, twinkled far back in his head. His nose remained buried in the mass of flesh which enveloped his round, full, and purple face; and his thick upper-lip rested upon the still thicker one beneath with an air of complacent self-satisfaction, much heightened by the owner's habit of licking them at intervals. He evidently regarded his tall shipmate with a feeling half-wondrous, half-quizzical; and stared up occasionally in his face as the red setting sun stares up at the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... appearance duly the next day at the dinner table; a really handsome man, if regular features and fine coloring be all that is necessary to constitute good looks; but his face wore an expression of self-satisfaction and contempt for others, which was not attractive ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... every kind of temptation. If each one was not careful to be his brother's keeper, then the voice of their brother's blood would cry unto God against them. There was scarcely a person present who could listen to their rector's sermon with feelings of self-satisfaction. ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... good woman, this blindness and self-satisfaction appear to show that this life of peace, which you yourself acknowledge yours has been, has gone somewhat too far—has not been altogether blessed to you. If you are really so satisfied with yourself as to be unable to see ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... own—for he cannot conceive of any other except himself—and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction." ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... enslaved natives, laboring in the mines for the aggrandizement and enrichment of Spain, and giving up their lives in the work, unrecognized and forgotten, while their exploiters, the children and relatives of Ferdinand and Isabella, sat back in luxury and self-satisfaction. We wondered as to what was killing our shipmates, ghosts ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... of the brain, or of the spirit, or of both, which he had been living, if not with content at least with ardor—a stronger thing than content. He felt unmanly, absurd. All sense of personal dignity and masculine self-satisfaction had fled from him. He was furious with himself for being so sensitive. Why should he care, even for half an hour, what Mrs. Shiffney thought of him? But there was within him—and he knew it—a surely weak ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... or service. The service might be merely nominal; in the case of noble lands in the eighteenth century, it generally was so; but nominal or real, the right to exact it was some one's property. If such a right did not put money in his purse, it yet added to his dignity and self-satisfaction. But such rights as this had come to be looked on with deep distrust by a large part of the French nation. Ideas of independence and of the abstract rights of man had struck deep root. It was felt that land should be owned absolutely,—by allodial possession, as the phrase is. The feudal services, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... that He had not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean to suggest that there really are some righteous persons who have no need of repentance; rather was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine irony to pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men whose need was greater just ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... the door again betokened the presence of Lettice, who came to announce a warm friend of the Doctor's, one Master Eccleston. On being admitted, the latter brought with him a low, ferret-eyed personage, whose leering aspect betrayed an inward consciousness of great cunning and self-satisfaction therewith. Dee received his guests with becoming dignity, inquiring to what good fortune he ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... we have looked at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;—and in one or other of these three ways it always is that man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... before the long strip of mirror between her two windows she turned to look at herself, leaning her elbow on the back of the chair in an attitude that might have been chosen for her portrait. It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care; but Gwendolen knew nothing of such inward strife. She had a naive delight in ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... marvelous facility of the Triestines in languages, by taking me down French books, Spanish books, German books, and reading from them all with the properest accent. Yet with this boyish pride and self-satisfaction there was mixed a tone of bitter and worldly cynicism, a belief in fortune as the sole providence. As nearly as I could make out, he was a Johnson man in American politics; upon the Mexican question he was independent, disdaining French and Mexicans alike. He was with the former ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... as a set-off to its brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... marked with small-pox, in green leather slippers, and wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker cage: ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... as soon as they were again settled in the study. "If you did not . . . like my sermon, tell me at once. You know that I am one of your boys, and you ought to . . . help me." Perhaps it was inseparable from his youth, with its buoyancy and self-satisfaction, and his training in a college whose members only knew by rumour of the existence of other places of theological learning, that Carmichael had at that moment a pleasing sense of humility and charity. Had it been a matter of scholastic ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... sort of happiness her eyes could see. He loved this dancing rout. He envied these boys and girls their passion and facility. They were, the most ignorant of them, of another stripe from arid New Englanders encased in their temperamental calm, the women, in a laughable self-satisfaction, leading the intellectual life and their men set on "making good". The poorest child of the East and South had an inheritance that made him responsive, fluent, even while it left him hot-headed and even ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... of these books. Very little reflection will show anyone the immeasurable distance between the sort of clergyman this book describes and the mere leader of formalities holding a similar position in these days of ease and self-satisfaction. ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... vanity. In Rowland's case happily it lasted until something better was able to get up its head a little. But no one can predict what the first result of suffering will be, not knowing what seeds lie nearest the surface. Rowland's self-satisfaction had been a hard pan beneath which lay thousands of germinal possibilities invaluable; and now the result of its tearing up remained to be seen. If in such case Truth's never-ceasing pull at the heart begins to be felt, allowed, considered; if conscience begin, like ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... become new acquaintance: some of their columns point to current events, and thus by a little aid of memory, make an outline chronology of the half-year; and, above all, if we have pleased the reader, we, at the same time, enjoy the self-satisfaction of having been employed to so gratifying an end. We like too the spirit of acquaintanceship which these prefacings, meetings, and greetings tend to keep up, although there may be persons who impatiently turn over a preface as the majority ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various
... won, it was Grumbo's wont to indulge himself in a little brief repose, which he would take stretched out on the ground, with his shaggy head laid, lion-like, on his extended paws—betraying, in both attitude and look, a sober self-satisfaction so entire as made it seem that for him the world had nothing more to offer. But this morning, notwithstanding the successful, even brilliant, winding up of their great adventure, our war-dog, instead of unbending as usual, held grimly aloof from the rest of the party, still seated ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... the big looking-glass between the windows, and find this compliment much easier to swallow than the Major's age. For the next half-hour they would chiefly talk about themselves in a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction. Major Flint, looking at the various implements and trophies that adorned the room, would suggest putting a sporting ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... chair, blowing rings of smoke, he seemed to detect something in his expression that filled him with a vague distrust about the genuineness of his professed interest in him. There was a sort of swagger in his whole posture, a slickness about his well-dressed, well-fed body, and a self-satisfaction in his somewhat burly face, nay, even in the manner his fat fingers held his fat cigar, that set Morgan wondering for the first time whether Ingram's attitude to literature did not in truth sum up the whole man; whether that popular ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... degree of self-satisfaction was mingled with her benevolence, and she began to think how pleased her mother would be to learn how hard she had worked in the cause of charity. She ran off for Betty to take her down to Mrs. Wilson's cottage; but she found Betty in no humor ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was a smug expression about the mouth—he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Lucy, ambled out his high-pacing nil admirantem character, and derived a little quiet self-satisfaction. This was the highest happiness he was capable of; so he was not ungrateful to Miss Fountain, who had procured it him, and partly for this, partly because he had been kind to her and lent her a pony, he shook hands with her somewhat cordially at parting. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... in a jesting mood, glowing with wild exultation. The money he had in his pocket, the treachery he was preparing, the conviction that he had sold himself at a good price—all filled him with the self-satisfaction characteristic of vicious people who naturally became merry and scornful amidst their evil practices. Of all his talk, however, aunt Dide only heard ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... go by the boat, my dear. I hate the Rhine boats, crowded with nasty selfish pigs of Germans. What I like is a first-class compartment all to myself, and no horrid foreigners. Especially Germans. They're bursting with self-satisfaction—have such an exaggerated belief in their "land" and their "folk." And when they come to England, they do nothing but find fault with us. If people aren't satisfied with the countries they travel in, they'd better stop at home—that's my ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the position in society which would have come to her naturally if she had but the patience to wait, caused her to be sneered at as a parvenu by those whose acquaintance she most desired. Unconscious of all this, she pursued her way in serene self-satisfaction,—a complacency shared by Eugenia, who delighted in the good fortune and bad taste which permitted her to wear dresses of silk or velvet to school every day in the week, and caused her to be as much admired as a little figure in a fashion-plate by those of her companions who were too unsophisticated ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... enmeshed in conventionality. The dangers of the quiet life are indolence, morbidity, sloth, depression, unmanliness; but I think that it develops humility, and allows the daily and hourly message of God to sink into the soul. After all, the one supreme peril is that of self-satisfaction and finality. If a man is content with what he is, there is nothing to make him long for what is higher. Any one who looks around him with a candid gaze, becomes aware that our life is and must be ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to so play the impassioned lover as to conceal the recreancy he had fostered in his own heart, Harry did not notice the coolness of this greeting. Then, too, his self-satisfaction had always done him the invaluable service of preventing a ready perception of the repellant ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... face was oily with that smile of complete self-satisfaction which is only found when foolishness and ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... things good. Supreme authority, surroundings of endless beauty, the respectful, even humble, deference of his inferiors, and never even an occasional visit from a superior, had in four years lowered him into a bed of ease and self-satisfaction. He was cut off from the world, and yet of it. Each month there came, via Jamaica, the three weeks' old copy of The Weekly Times; he subscribed to Mudie's Colonial Library; and from the States he had ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... coaxing kindness of manner, one that is sometimes lacking in sincerity. Unctuous implies excessive smoothness, as though one's manner were oiled. The word carries a decided suggestion of hypocrisy. Fulsome suggests such gross flattery as to be annoying or cloying. Smug suggests an effeminate self-satisfaction, usually not ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... work which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... tact of Queen Cristina, by whose wish a royal summer villa had risen over the waters of the bay. Owing to this stroke of clever policy, a poor and discontented town was transformed into the most fashionable watering place of Spain, and surely if slowly disaffection merged into prosperous self-satisfaction. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... may be imagined. Who but she could have done this? This was as if a painter should so paint a man as to deceive his species. This was acting, but not like the acting of the stage. He was in transports, and self-satisfaction at his own judgment ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... everything she had, and told her to go home to her father. Having consummated this summary divorce, for which he could show good reasons, he came back, seated himself in his usual place, and began to smoke with an air of utmost tranquillity and self-satisfaction. ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the day, however, vain Nancy was enveloped in a rosy cloud of self-satisfaction. It was pleasing to be admired and still more pleasing to feel that the admiration ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... self-respect, for the consciousness of being well-dressed, or, rather, when the knowledge that they are well-dressed relieves them of all consciousness upon the subject. To decide upon the costume which can secure this serene self-satisfaction is impossible. For to excellence in dress there are positive and relative conditions. A man cannot be positively well-dressed, whose costume does not suit the peculiarities of his person and position,—or relatively, whose exterior does not sufficiently ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... described—with evident self-satisfaction—how he had heard, from a common friend, of Watson's arrival, how he had rescued the invalid from a dingy Bloomsbury hotel, and settled him in some rooms in Fitzroy Square, with a landlady who could ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all," he said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is a cad, in the ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... at work. The young master of the house was full of abstraction and dreams, wrapped in some pursuit, some hope, some absorbing preoccupation of his own. His mother was straining at her bonds like a greyhound in a leash. Minnie, who had been the chief example of absolute self-satisfaction and certainty that everything was right, had developed a keenness of curiosity and censure which betrayed her conviction that something had gone wrong. These three were all, as it were, on tiptoe, on the boundary line, the thinnest edge which divided the known from the unknown; conscious ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... servant had set the tea and left the room, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up and went to the writing-table. Moving into the middle of the table a portfolio of papers, with a scarcely perceptible smile of self-satisfaction, he took a pencil from a rack and plunged into the perusal of a complex report relating to the present complication. The complication was of this nature: Alexey Alexandrovitch's characteristic quality as a politician, that special individual ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue. Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Unionists. But a few birds of passage I have seen have vexed me with their confident ignorance, and caused me to believe that English Gladstonians are the densest donkeys under the sun. They are so self-opiniated, and so full of self-satisfaction, that it is hard to be patient with them. Not a few say simply that they are content to leave the matter in the hands of Mr. Gladstone, and that as they followed him so far, they will follow him to the end. They decline ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... came into his mother's eyes and sent a glow of self-satisfaction through his whole being. The look was familiar to him and meant that his mother was annoyed by the question but pleased with his ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... of all that folly," said Mr. World with a feeling of self-satisfaction, "I see a long line of separate buildings just below us—there along the King's Highway. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... something like a South American poncho, or the tabard of a herald. These ends he tied together, under the armpits; and thus arrayed, presented himself once more before the captain, with an air of perfect self-satisfaction, as though he thought it impossible for any fault to be ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... "Imperium in imperio, Emilia, my soul," with an air of profound self-satisfaction which, somehow, in a curious way, seemed to contain a queer admixture of bodily discomfort. But that, perhaps, could only be visible to the initiated. And for the initiated it was a wonderful place, this drawing-room of the Casa Gould, with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Napoleon, he would have made himself sure personally as to "the last gaiter button" and all other details, but with sublime self-satisfaction and inane blindness the Second Napoleon put himself at the head of this unready army, inspired apparently with the "on to Berlin" confidence of the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... was getting low as the Rat sculled gently homewards in a dreamy mood, murmuring poetry-things over to himself, and not paying much attention to Mole. But the Mole was very full of lunch, and self-satisfaction, and pride, and already quite at home in a boat (so he thought), and was getting a bit restless besides: and presently he said, "Ratty! Please, I ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on unaided, which she did in a vanquished ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... into a cab, and quite coolly Dick told the driver to go to Hammersmith. He sat himself down by her side, with a smile of self-satisfaction. ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... his hand to Luigi, who grasped it eagerly, and, after a few incoherent words, Mansana took his leave in the same spirit of confident self-satisfaction in which he had come. The little lieutenant, who throughout this interview had felt as though he were in the presence of his executioner, was now seized with a bewildering sense of joy at his departure. He jumped about the room, and broke into a loud peal of laughter. Mansana, who was still upon ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... fortunate, and commiseration of those who are in trouble, are alike rooted in emulation. Man is by nature inclined to envy and malevolence. Hate easily leads to underestimation, love to overestimation, of the object, and self-love to pride or self-satisfaction, which are much more frequently met with than unfeigned humility. Immoderate desire for honor is termed ambition; if the desire to please others is kept within due bounds it is praised as unpretentiousness, courtesy, modesty (modestia). Ambition, luxury, drunkenness, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of Shakespeare that the lovers do not dream fairy tales of their childhood. Higher culture has given them deeper passions, more intense personal relations; in dreams they but continue the life of waking. But the good weaver who lives thoroughly content in his own self-satisfaction and in the esteem of his neighbors, who has never reflected upon anything that has happened to him, but has received each day's blessings as they have come—this man sees, the moment he lays his head on the pillow, the fairies and the fairy queen. To him the whole circle of childhood ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... pencil and chisel of art. Even the undistinguished services of those who have fought in the war for the Union, and who have passed unchallenged through the fiery ordeal, will be cherished by their children, and transmitted to their remoter posterity with patriotic pride and pardonable self-satisfaction. Thus the glory of noble deeds in this memorable war will everywhere shed its lustre on the national character, and will tend to stimulate the loftiest virtues in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... since emancipation and of the great and essential part they had played in the upbuilding of the South—left prostrate by the Civil War. One could see their eager, upturned faces glow with pride and self-satisfaction. But suddenly he would shift the tone of his comments and tell them how sadly those of them who were indolent and shiftless and unreliable and vicious were retarding the upward struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... the renegades stood in a little opening, and the moonlight fell full upon his face. They could see it distorted into a malicious grin of cruelty and self-satisfaction. Slowly the rifle barrel of Shif'less Sol, in the bushes, was raised to a level, and it was pointed straight at a spot between the cruel, grinning eyes. An infallible eye looked down the sight, and a steady finger ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... their satisfaction, and somewhat to Dick's self-satisfaction, they heard a low noise ahead, which they knew ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... aroused the millionaire from a reverie which had been the reverse of pleasant. The fact was, and it is necessary to insist on it, that Mr Racksole, owner of the Grand Babylon Hotel, was by no means in a state of self-satisfaction. A mystery had attached itself to his hotel, and with all his acumen and knowledge of things in general he was unable to solve that mystery. He laughed at the fruitless efforts of the police, but he could not honestly say that his own efforts had been less barren. The public was talking, ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Here Sweetwater sat and communed with his great monitor, the ocean, and only from his flashing eye and the firm set of his lips could the mother of Sweetwater see that the crisis of her son's life was rapidly approaching, and that on the outcome of this long brooding rested not only his own self-satisfaction, but the interests of the man most ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... teach him the flageolet two hours every morning before the maids were up), for his temper in managing an argument. Mr. Kirkpatrick was one of those bland, simpering, self-complacent men, who, unshakable from the high tower of their own self-satisfaction, look down upon your arguments from their magnificent elevation. 'I will explain,' was his condescending phrase. If you corrected the intolerable magnifico, he corrected your correction; if you hinted at an obvious blunder, he was always aware what your mistaken objection would be. He and his clique ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... they do not like, they neglect, or refuse, or resist. Many of these preferences, though not harmful in themselves, lead continually to that subjection of the will to self-interest, and help that self-satisfaction and self-love which are the deadly enemies of the soul. Now, true self-denial is the denial, for Christ's sake and the sake of souls, of these preferences. To say to God: "I sacrifice my way for Thy way—my wish for Thy wish—my will for Thy ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... glance to the Vaynor man, who tries vainly to combine a mouthful of ice pudding, a smirk of self-satisfaction, a glare of intense devotion, and the stolidity of a British ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of devoirs between the Governor and General Deffenbaugh on Lee Avenue, His Excellency, with a comfortable air of self-satisfaction, spoke of the appointment that ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... saw that Miss Foster's tight-fitting bodice was the matter. Yes, there was something about that bodice, those teeth, that tongue, that hair, something about her, which seemed to challenge the whole system of his ideas, all his philosophy, self-satisfaction, seriousness, smugness, and general invincibility. And he thought of her continually—no particular thought, but a comprehensive, enveloping, brooding, static thought. And he was strangely jolly and uplifted, full of affectionate, ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... desired to be directed to some place. So he gave a glance round, and discovering that the man was begging he shook his head gravely. The beggar departed, and Charlie inwardly congratulated himself on having done very well. His self-satisfaction was, however, short-lived. He looked round to assure himself that Fred and Ping Wang were following him, and just as he did so a European lady stepped out of a shop, and her parasol, which she was in the act of opening, prodded him in the back. He turned sharply, and the lady, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... outrance it lacks a seriousness commensurate with its claims—that it exhibits indeed a kind of undertone of frivolity that is all the nearer to the absolutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak, of its unconsciousness. The reason is, partly no doubt, to be ascribed to its debonnaire self-satisfaction, its disposition to "lightly run amuck at an august thing," the traditions of centuries namely, to its bumptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy. This is surely a fatal flaw in any system, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... be thought that the joy and happiness he experienced in religion arose from any inward sense of self-satisfaction. Never had a man a humbler estimate of himself than Gordon, but his faith in this respect took a very healthy form. Instead of morbidly looking into his own heart for evidences of his union with Christ, he ever kept his eye on the precious work ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... as the acknowledged Head of the little society, felt a pleasant thrill of self-satisfaction. "I don't know," he said. "I must think of it. It looks easy, and yet—" He paused as something in the water caught his eye. It was a mass of bladdery seaweed that the returning tide was wafting slowly to the shore. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Certainly something, the three years or the discipline and training and suffering, or all combined, had changed him. He was not as he used to be. Things he liked very much he no longer liked at all. And where, oh where, was the serene self-satisfaction which once was his? ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... attractive style, many fine passages from Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakspeare, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and a host of lesser lights in the poetic hemisphere—and could quote from and criticise the philosophy and style of Bulwer with the most edifying self-satisfaction imaginable—not to enumerate her many ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... death of Southey (1843) he was made poet laureate, against his own inclination. The late excessive praise left him quite as unmoved as the first excessive neglect. The steady decline in the quality of his work is due not, as might be expected, to self-satisfaction at success, but rather to his intense conservatism, to his living too much alone and failing to test his work by the standards and judgment of other literary men. He died tranquilly in 1850, at the age of eighty ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... this Captain of the Second Company beamed with a self-satisfaction that added splendor to his ruddy and somewhat chubby face. The halo of glory that a fortune made in business gives to a retired tradesman sat on his brow, and stamped him as one of the elect of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Dreamers are our strictly unpaid torch-bearers. They light the path for us; and we murmur 'Poor fools!' with a kind of sneaking self-satisfaction, when they ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... that morning, when Gordon, the town sergeant, stepped from his door and started down the street with no little self-satisfaction. He had been arraying himself for a full hour, and after a tub-bath and a shave he stepped, spic and span, into the street with his head steadily held high, except when he bent it to look at the shine of ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... friend of Emerson's, said, "There are so many things in the universe more interesting than my individual faults, that I really cannot stay to dwell on them." There is one form of conceit—or rather of self-satisfaction—to which schoolgirls are liable: they know they are living up to the average standard imposed by public opinion and esprit de corps, and they are satisfied with this, instead of trying to live up to their own best self. It is quite possible for any straightforward, honourable ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... wheezed the other; "but you're lamer than me," he added with a forlorn sort of self-satisfaction, critically eyeing Israel's limp as once, more he stumped on his way, not liking ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... hansom cab swept round the corner, its dashing driver smoking a cigar in sublime self-satisfaction, and looking carelessly right and left for a "fare." This exquisite almost ran into the engine! There was a terrific howl from all the firemen; the cabby turned his smart horse with a bound to one side, and lost his cigar in the act—in reference to which misfortune he was heartily congratulated ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... open-work. Everything was new. In this repaired and restored house, the fresh-colored look of which contrasted with the time-worn exteriors of all the other houses, an observer would instantly perceive the paltry taste and perfect self-satisfaction of the retired ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... performed, perhaps, his first action with no thought of self at the back of it. He had risked his life to save that of a stranger. The fact astonished him, while it pleased him hugely. The sensation was at once novel and thrilling. Since it was so agreeable, he meant to prolong the glow of self-satisfaction by continuing to care for this waif of the river. He must make his rescue complete. It did not occur to him to question his fitness for the work. His introspection did not reach to a point of suspecting that he, an habitual criminal, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... thrown the water over this galoot instead of him," and the thermometer of "Dora's" self-satisfaction fell considerably when she did not appear ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... explain them in Germany. In his fatuous, insular way, it pleased him to regard them rather as a species of aborigines benefiting by English civilization. The English Ass and the German Ass are touchingly alike. The shade of difference is that the English Ass's sublime self-satisfaction is in the German Ass self-glorification. The English Ass smirks and plumes himself; the German Ass blusters ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... obliged, however humbling it may sound, to except myself: as far as I was concerned, those blue eyes were guiltless, and calm as the sky, to whose tint theirs seemed akin. So it came to pass that I heard the others talk, wondered often at their gaiety, security, and self-satisfaction, but did not trouble myself to look up and gaze along the path they seemed so certain of treading. This then was no billet-doux; and it was in settled conviction to the contrary that I quietly opened it. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... glorious army of Frederick the Great had gone to sleep on its laurels, ossified in pipeclay details, led by old, incapable generals, its officers shy of work, sunk in luxury, good living, and foolish self-satisfaction. In a word, the army was no longer not only not equal to its task, but had forgotten it. Heavy was the punishment of Heaven, which overtook it and our folk. They were flung into the dust, Frederick's glory faded, the standards were cast down. In seven years of painful ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... few pots and growing more interested and determined on that account. At last the fascinating game took a strong hold on him. He enjoyed its risks and ventured, on a trifling hand, to bluff the company and secure a fair stake. To his self-satisfaction intense ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... loose white sailor suit scampered about from one place to another, simmering in perfect enjoyment. And the central figure of all was Esme Amarinth, who stood leaning upon an ebony stick with a silver knob, surveying his audience with the peculiar smile of humourous self-satisfaction that was so ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... beverage,—sherry and soda-water; and others, who had resolutely kept their seats since the opening of the debate, rewarded their devotion to the interests of the public by a more elaborate repast. Now and then a member in full evening dress would lounge into the House, with that air of perfect self-satisfaction which tells of a good dinner by no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... safety—kalkilatin' that while these road gentry allus goes for a man's pockets and his body belt, they never thinks of his butes, or haven't time to go through 'em." He looked around him with a smile of self-satisfaction. ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... should then have ceased to be "representative," and it was as representatives that we had come. And so one would sit and listen, and watch—one person, and two characters. Lloyd George, when his imagination was not swamped in self-satisfaction, was quite evangelical to listen to— sometimes. But there he was representative—not of principles, nor of those visionary sparks which he struck so easily and threw off like matches, but of a successful election ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... happens to him as it is written: It is enough that the same therefore be punished by many [II Cor. 2:6].{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} There are still other dangers which we say accompany the solitary life, the first and greatest is that of self-satisfaction. For he who has no one to test his work easily believes that he has completely fulfilled ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... gratification made her look prettier than ever, and Mrs Fanshawe felt an agreeable glow of self-satisfaction. Nothing she liked better than to play the part of Lady Bountiful, especially when any effort involved was shifted onto the shoulders of another, and in her careless fashion she was really anxious to do this nice ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard. We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an acquaintance with women: he would have conquering ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is perfectly plain,' said I, leaning back in my chair, and regarding the puzzled Hale with that cherubic expression of self-satisfaction which I know is so annoying ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... he had done his neighbour a service at some inconvenience to himself, or that he had refrained from retaliating on anybody against whom he believed he had a grievance, or for whom he had no liking, a certain self-satisfaction stole, sneaked into his mind, a certain vain-glory, ending in the senseless conclusion that he was superior to many another man; and then, on this feeling of petty vanity, pride was engrafted—the pride of a virtue he had not even struggled to acquire, the arrogance ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... red spot as big as a cherry in either cheek, and her eyes scintillated with concentrated scorn and anger. Over her shoulder was visible Abe Konkapot's swarthy face, wearing a smile of great self-satisfaction. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... to the woman selling air-balloons with restored self-satisfaction, and stood there in the high wind, diving into his pockets for the amount required. The air balloons blew about—purple, pink and white—all looking almost equally colourless by the faint light as they bobbed about the woman's ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... proposition and Pee-wee accompanied him back to the lake, keeping up a running fire of enthusiastic encouragement and representing to him the delight and self-satisfaction of circumventing a pair of scoundrels. "They've got pistols and everything," he said as a clincher, "and if they'd steal a car they'd kill ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... woman was delighted at the prospect of better times?" said Old Hurricane, with a little glow of benevolent self-satisfaction. ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... and fills the useful office of Vice-Chamberlain. Next to him is Sir H. Selwin-Ibbetson, Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, and whom I have heard genially described as "one of the prosiest speakers in the House." Next to him, with a paper in his hand and a smirk of supreme self-satisfaction on his face, is Mr. Cross, ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... not care about that," said Reitzei, contemptuously, though he was not speaking the truth: his self-satisfaction had been grievously hurt. "You put too great a value on your opinion, Beratinsky; it is not everything that you know about: we will let that pass. But when one goes into a society as a guest, one expects to be treated as a guest. No matter; I was among ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Then, he dropped down upon a vacant one that was beside her, and, resting one elbow on the table, peered inquiringly into the girl's flushed face, more beautiful than ever in her excitement. That strange feeling of exhilaration was still upon her, and there was undoubted triumph and self-satisfaction depicted ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... own pieces that he had no thought to spare? This he left to the dominion of chance, which blew together the atoms of Epicurus. But supposing that, devoid of any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely laboured to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect, would have led him to bestow attention to the structure and adherence ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... rouse and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of-the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and natural an impulse, still has a place of its own—especially as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid-Victorian propriety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and energetic audacities of the sensational younger authors and artists; the old walls fell; the public, once so apathetic to belles lettres, was more than attentive to every phase of literary experimentation. The last decade of the nineteenth ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... my thought at the beginning—the necessity for 'Sureness' in regard to religion, and especially in the experience of Holiness—let me ask, Where are we found? Have the testings confirmed that certainty of heart, or have my words disturbed self-satisfaction? Do not be afraid of facing the direct issue. If you have the evidences referred to, then be sure to go about proclaiming what God has done. But if not, then this unsatisfied and unsatisfactory condition cannot be persisted ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... the parenthesis, and return to my ill-humor. The little speech I have just addressed to myself has restored me my self-satisfaction, but made me more dissatisfied with others. I could now enjoy my breakfast; but the portress has forgotten my morning's milk, and the pot of preserves is empty! Anyone else would have been vexed: as for me, I affect the most ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in international relations which appealed strongly to those who preferred to adopt unusual and untried methods rather than to accept those which had been tested by experience and found practical of operation. The self-satisfaction of inventing something new or of evolving a new theory is inherent with not a few men. They are determined to try out their ideas and are impatient of opposition which seeks to prevent the experiment. In fact opposition seems sometimes to enhance the virtue of a novelty ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... Castle through the beautiful domain of park and wood, Grimond was aghast at his pinched and drawn face and the gleam in his eye. "May the Lord hae mercy, but I doot sairly that he is aff his head, and that there will be wild work at Dudhope." And while Grimond had all the imperturbable self-satisfaction and unshaken dourness of the Lowland Scot, and never on any occasion acknowledged that he could be wrong or changed his way, he almost wished that he had left this affair alone and had not meddled between his master and his master's wife. It was again a fair and sunny day, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... from one whom he has undone, rather than the whole from one to whom he has shewn Mercy. This Benignity is essential to the Character of a fair Trader, and any Man who designs to enjoy his Wealth with Honour and Self-Satisfaction: Nay, it would not be hard to maintain, that the Practice of supporting good and industrious Men, would carry a Man further even to his Profit, than indulging the Propensity of serving and obliging the Fortunate. My Author argues on this Subject, in order to incline ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... inexhaustible knowledge or imagination, whichever it may be, to the perpetual repetition of some half-dozen conceptions by Claude and Poussin, I have been met by the formidable objection, enunciated with much dignity and self-satisfaction on the part of my antagonist—"That is not painting general truths, that is painting particular truths." Now there must be something wrong in that application of a principle which would make the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... back to Dartmouth, while Doria spoke eagerly. But the passenger felt little disposed to gratify the Italian's curiosity. Instead he asked him a few questions respecting himself and found that the other delighted to discuss his own affairs. Doria revealed a southern levity and self-satisfaction that furnished Brendon with something to think about before the launch ran to the ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... slave-drivers of all below them. They are determined to live on the best the world can afford, and they care nothing if the miserable perish in clusters around their feet. The howls of starvation will not lessen one iota their appetite or their self-satisfaction. These constitute the great man's world. He mistakes their cringings, posturings and compliments for the approval of mankind. He does not perceive how shallow and temporary and worse than useless is the life he leads; and he cannot see, beyond these ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... skilled dealer in truisms, in wordy platitudes couched largely in plagiarized language from the poets and essayists, in all the pseudo-religious slickeries wherewith men's souls are so easily lulled into self-satisfaction. The Good, the True, the Beautiful; these were his texts, but the real god of his worship was Success. This, under the guise of Duty ("man's God-inspired ambition to be true to his best possibilities"), he preached day in and day out through his "Daily Help" in The Patriot: Be guided by me and ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... audacious betrayal by an Oriental woman of the narrowness, the shallowness, the dishonesty which ages of false education have fastened upon her race. The lady in question is—and evidently knows herself to be—an exception among her countrywomen for ability and acumen: an extreme self-satisfaction and vanity are revealed in the recital of her most disreputable tricks. She passes for a white blackbird, a woman of intellect caught in the harem; and it needs but little ingenuity to guess the torment she must have been to her protectors—first to the excellent Dr. Millingen, with whom she formed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... being all mellowness and amiability, that Diary. Hone had his prejudices and dislikes and strong political opinions. In the portraits that have been preserved there is the suggestion of intolerance and smug self-satisfaction. Also life did not turn out quite so rosy as it promised in 1828, when he retired from business with a handsome competence. In 1836, during the commercial depression, he met with financial reverses which forced him to return ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... secret reluctance to meet Jack—he was so different since the Gipsy Smith revival; of course, he was perfectly lovely, and unchanged toward her, but—somehow, she felt uncomfortable in his presence—and she didn't enjoy having her self-satisfaction disturbed. ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... and himself in full perfection. Should he, perchance, at any time see another, it is in a manner that only enlarges the perception of his own personal excellences, and strengthens his consciousness of self-importance and self-satisfaction. ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... far from satisfied with herself as she was; she would have liked to possess a great talent like Gora, or be an intellectual power in the world of some sort. She was far from stultification by the national gift of complacence, careless self-satisfaction—racial rather than individual...qualities that have made the United States lag far behind the greater European nations in all but material development and a certain inventiveness; both of which in some cases are outclassed in the ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... of the limited income on which existence went on at Villa Elsa. It was characteristic. Though limited, the income was secure. Despite the economies practiced, the prevailing confidence and self-satisfaction did not suffer, as a result, the slightest impairment. It was ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... he pulled up by the porch and directed me to stand by the young mare's head, wore a look of extreme self-satisfaction. Beside him, also beaming, sat Mr. Goodfellow, with the corner cupboard nursed ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... stand thus, see and be seen, At the proper place in the proper minute, 190 And die away the life between. And it was amusing enough, each infraction Of rule—(but for after-sadness that came) To hear the consummate self-satisfaction With which the young Duke and the old dame 195 Would let her advise, and criticize, And, being a fool, instruct the wise, And, child-like, parcel out praise or blame: They bore it all in complacent guise, As though an artificer, after contriving 200 A wheel-work image as ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and only justice, ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... self-made man. And with him the commercial spirit of the age. Enter the clink of coin and the unctuous corpulence of a roll of bills. Enter the essence of self-satisfaction, the glorious spectacle of a man who spells "myself" ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... spurned this ignoble existence and called for higher aims and worthier exertion. He was not vicious, he never had been vicious, or, as somebody else said, his vices were all refined vices; but a life of mere self-indulgence although pursued without self-satisfaction, is constantly lowering the standard and weakening the forces of virtue,—lessening the whole man. He felt it so; and to leave his ordinary scenes and occupations and lose a morning with little Fleda was a freshening of his better nature; it was like breathing pure air after the fever heat of a ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... great victory. Yet sometimes victories are more dangerous than defeats. They lead to self-satisfaction. This was certainly the case with this victory of the authors of Deuteronomy. The people were careful to offer up their sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, and very few offerings were brought to the old ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... remote and peaceful hills, in the court-room, in the plain pathos of Steve's death and Alice's heroism, and now in this suicide,—all that had given her insight and made her different from what she had been,—all that revealed the cheapness of her old ideals of freedom, intellectual development, self-satisfaction, that cult of the ego, which she had pursued in sympathy with the age. Now she wished to put it away, to remove herself and her husband, their lives together, outwardly as she had withdrawn herself inwardly. And her husband, moved in spite of himself ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... uttered, and, wrapt in the mantle of self-satisfaction that they were not as other men, the company gathered in the kitchen of Ford Manor broke up, and, in the gathering twilight, dispersed to ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... But it needs to be said here that the traditional superintendent and teacher will greet this entire plan with a supercilious smile. They will call it visionary, unpractical, and idealistic—then return to their seventy-five per cent regime with the utmost complacency and self-satisfaction. It is ever so with the traditional teacher. He seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his complacent way without hindrance. To him every innovation is an interference, if not a positive impertinence. But, in spite of the traditional teacher, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... already had offensive volumes found harbourage on the shelves, and revolutionary periodicals been introduced into the reading-room. From time to time the Mercury uttered a note of warning, of protest, but with no echo from the respectable middle-class abodes where Polterham Conservatism dozed in self-satisfaction. It needed another five years of Liberal activity throughout the borough to awaken the good people whose influence had seemed unassailable, and to set them uttering sleepy snorts of indignation But the Mercury had a new editor, a man who was determined to ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... alone the cardinal looked at himself in the glass with a feeling of self-satisfaction. Still young—for he was scarcely forty-six years of age—he possessed great elegance of form and was above the middle height; his complexion was brilliant and beautiful; his glance full of expression; his nose, though large, was well proportioned; his forehead ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Gee addressed him as "Crocodile," in that half-jeering, half-bullying tone which is characteristic of self-satisfaction in ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... to see him examine the world, reject this and that and look upon his choice proudly. He made the schools observe him, consider him. He did not enter them for alteration, nor was he shut up in a shell of self-satisfaction. He entered them as a citizen of the world and as an examiner of all philosophy. Yet the world taught him nothing. It gave him merely the open school where regulation and atmosphere helped him to teach ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller |
