"Smugness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glazed abominations, he wondered who had been the greater sinner, the English artist or the Teutonic engraver; probably the former, he told himself, for, after all, the latter had only spoiled what detail there might have been; he had copied the smugness and the false sentiment, perhaps rejoiced in them as being essentially the products of Teutonic thought, but it had been the Englishman who had put that smugness on to the canvas in the ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... a show of self-deprecation which his smugness belied, "I suppose I am one of those jolly old spiders who sit in the centre of my web, or one of those perfectly dinky little tigers who sit in my jolly old lair, ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied smugness—of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could be ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... of unsensitiveness in a modern library, of hurry and rush and efficiency, above all, the kind of moral smugness one feels there, the book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street feeling one has—all these things are very grave and important obstacles which our great librarians, with their great systems—most of them—have yet to reckon with. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... newly-written poem Mr. Lanier says in a letter of March, 1874: "Of course, since I have written it to print I cannot make it such as *I* desire in artistic design: for the forms of to-day require a certain trim smugness and clean-shaven propriety in the face and dress of a poem, and I must win a hearing by conforming in some degree to these tyrannies, with a view to overturning them in the future. Written so, it is not nearly so beautiful as I would have it; ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... at this moment had a shining quality. Still smug, she was now of a glorified smugness. If one could imagine a lily turned into a god, or a young god turned into a lily and walking down the middle of a sun-flecked Californian lane, it wouldn't be far out, thought Mr. Twist, as an image of the advancing Twinkler. The god would be ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl—who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley |
