"Smug" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an American, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants' hall antics of New York society to the great plains where the Adamses hew the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... at the smug face and a slow grin crept over his own, in spite of himself. "Ser Perth, I'm afraid you've made a ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... so!" said Falloden wrathfully. "He is an impossible person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own poems when he hasn't been asked. And he curries favour—abominably—with the dons. He is a smug—of the first water. There is a movement going on in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able to ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... help this time. Some day I shall, and then I shall have a portrait on the cover. This is an age of portraits. But some day the British public will wake up and will refuse to read the works of a smug- faced man in spectacles who tries to make them believe that he is doughty, fearless, and beloved of beautiful damsels. The bookstalls are full to-day of works written in the first person singular, and relating deeds of the utmost daring; while ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... Siege impartial... Au-dessus de la bataille...." The good Cardinal would have made a good lawyer. He had as little to say about God and the general righteousness of things as the Bishop of London. But he got in some smug reminders of the severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Perhaps now France will be wiser. He pointed out that the Holy See in its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915, invited the belligerents ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... different from a Methodist or a Presbyterian. He and his wife arrived to noon dinner, and I had to be civil because the Trowbridges respect them very much; but it was difficult when the man said that England was the most immoral and decaying country in the world, and his wife echoed him. He is a smug old fellow with a fringe of grey fluff growing out all round under his chin; and his upper lip, very long and shaved, is like the straight cover you see on ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the Piccadilly entrance of the restaurant touched his hat ingratiatingly, with the smug confidence of a man who is accustomed to getting sixpence a time for ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... circled, where the rain fell and the wind called with a passionate cadence among the hills. To marry Franklin Kane—would it not be to abandon the past; would it not be to desecrate it and make it hers no longer? Was not the solitary moorland better, the anguish and despair better than the smug, warm, sane life of purpose and endeavour? If she was too tired, too indifferent, if she acquiesced, if she married Franklin Kane, would she forget that the reallest thing in her life had not been its sanity, and its purpose, but its wild, its secret, its broken-hearted love? Surely ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... repression and lectures his young charge was growing up a lad of spirit. He still hoped that some day Leslie might return, and he knew how horrified he would be were he to find that his son was becoming a smug and well conducted citizen. No small portion of his time on each of his visits to Glasgow Malcolm spent in training the boy in ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... what on earth it is That makes me think my lady's poodle (Her minion smug of solemn phiz,) The pink and pattern of a noodle: Its eyes are deep; their look, serene; Its lips are sensitive and smiling; But oh! the gross effect, I ween, Is, passing measure, ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... to the well-known character of the King, thirsting for what is interesting and important, to find that "interesting" and "much celebrated" pauperism on his own soil, in conjunction with an opportunity of making people talk about him afresh. How smug he must have felt at the news that henceforth he possessed his ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... prosperity. He stood now, the silk hat cocked a little to one side, one hand under the tail of his broadcloth coat, a pudgy finger of the other pointing to some new feature of the mechanism of the new carts, and he looked the personification of self-satisfaction and smug content. ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... Capital "conscripted" (delightful verb), debt repudiated, and Anarchy enthroned. Strangely dissimilar results are predicted by the Party-hacks, who, being by lifelong habit trained to applaud whatever Government does, announce with smug satisfaction that the British workman loves property, and will use his new powers to conserve it; adores the Crown, and feels that the House of Lords is the true protector ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... chronicled in the columns of every newspaper. Daily its bells toll. Its melancholy pageantry traverses the streets of wealthy quarters, and it stalks abroad hourly in the slums, and few there are who gaze after it. But here it comes so seldom that its dread features are not made smug by familiarity. When Hite was told to look again at the face and see if memory might not have played him false, to make sure he had never seen the man before yesterday, he hesitated, and advanced with such reluctance, and started back, dropping the cloth, with such swift repulsion, that the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the Kaiser's attitudes and their reflections preceeding the war in the German military party, were struck by a strange blending of martial glory and Christian compunction. No one prays more loudly than the hypocrite and none so smug as the devil when a ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... of the heart," at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold, formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for the Wesleys were soon to stir the sluggish current of English ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... a broad-shouldered, bearded Dutchman, a very Hercules of a man, with a voice like a bass drum, told, between meditative puffs at his pipe, of hair-raising adventures in capturing wild animals, so that those smug and sheltered folk at home who visit the zoological gardens of a Sunday afternoon might see for themselves the crocodile and the boa-constrictor, the orang-utan and the clouded tiger. When, after the last tale had been told ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the greatest surprise of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... classes had their coffee-shops and, supposedly, in some degree the gin-palaces, which however, mostly existed in the picturesque vocabulary of the "smug" reformer. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... sordid, brutal, sickening! Dull callousness to smug contrition quickening Under the spur of an ignoble terror, A hope scarce less ignoble—in expression, At least. Yes, calm judicial self-possession Is difficult, most easy trimming error; But compromise with claims conflicting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... with astonishment reflected on the difference between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c.? The fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eyebrows,—the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag,—and with none of those marks which our fancy had ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... concerned myself." And, contrary to his custom, Reed laughed bitterly. "As for you, Brenton, I wonder you're not as bad as Baalam's ass. If they could have their way, they would strip you of your clerical broadcloth and robe you in a full suit of angelic eider down. Still, you needn't look smug, while you deny it; it's nothing to be proud about. It's not your preaching does it, man; it's chiefly on account of your voice, and the way your hair sprouts from your scalp. For pure purposes of religion, a hairy baritone is a long way more potent than a bald and quavering tenor; at least, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the maggots madden me. "I know you for what you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself the Noseless One and your way leads to the Night. Hedonism has no meaning. It, too, is a lie, at best the coward's smug compromise." ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... self-complacent, too comfortable, too secure in its social and political alliances; and he was bent on shaming people into severer notions. "We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: 'pampered aristocrats,' 'resident gentlemen,' 'smug parsons,' and 'pauperes Christi'. I shall use the first on all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing." "I think of putting the view forward (about new monasteries), under the title of a 'Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.' ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... on the point when they reached the monorail station. Three Suspendeds, obviously better educated than most, were being led away by a large group of paraNormals. The paraNormals had their smug expressions back but there was a strange gleam of determination in their eyes. "Sometimes life itself gets overly melodramatic," Rhoda ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content (erbrmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose—the elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... he did appear Like a slop-merchant from Wapping, And with smug face, and eye severe, On every side did perk and peer Till he saw Peter dead ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... cares and grievances, and are permitted to live for a little while in an altogether different world—the world not of things and ambitions and cares, but of ecstasy. Such performances and such an attitude on the part of the listener are all too rare in these days of smug intellectualism and hypersophistication, and we venture to assert that this is at least partly due to the fact that many present-day conductors are intellectual rather ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... paints the sky, And every splendid noontide high, All know the Glugs so well, so well. 'Tis an easy matter, and plain to tell. For, lacking wit, with a candour smug, A Glug will boast that he is a Glug. And they climb the trees, if it shines or rains, To settle the squirming in their brains, And the darting pains That are caused by rushing ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... to avoid this moment. But now that the discussion was upon him, he said to himself that he would not traffic with the insincerities, he would not be recreant to his own identity. He would not fawn, and bow, and play the smug squire of dames, full of specious flatteries, and kiss the hand ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... been withheld from her in this world! What would the resurrection mean to a poor little soul like that? What could it mean? Ah! Perhaps it had not all been her fault! Perhaps there were others who had helped push her down, smug in self-righteousness, to whom the resurrection would be more of a horror than to the pretty, ignorant child whose untaught feet had strayed into forbidden paths! Who knew? He was glad to look up and feel the Presence there! Who knew what might have passed between ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... end of the week he means Saturday, which is a very long way off. Saturdays used to seem to come rushing on to the very heels of Mondays in Berlin when I was busy working. Little mother, you can take it from me, from your wise, smug daughter, that work is the key to every happiness. Without it happiness won't come unlocked. What do people do who don't do anything, ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... for three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... Suddenly, dark and smug, a swaying object which we had not observed till then, took monstrous form before our eyes and in it we recognized an old friend, the Channel boat Elfrida, which lay basking in the velvet shadows like a dozing cat and gently pulling on her cables. Why not? We ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... out of their way to insult Him, hath ever been a mystery to me. My father in a rough stern voice bade him speak with more reverence of sacred things, on which the pair of them gave tongue together, swearing tenfold worse than before, and calling my father a canting rogue and a smug-faced Presbytery Jack. What more they might have said I know not, for my father picked up the great roller wherewith he smoothed the leather, and dashing at them he brought it down on the side of one of ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... promotion breeds conceit only in base natures. The greyhound is a gentleman, respectful and self-respecting, and it shows that by the very carriage of its tail. Only a snob at heart, petted and pampered for many generations, could have produced that perfect incarnation of smug self-satisfaction, the pug. Let us take the lesson home. The thoughts on which we let our minds dwell, and the sentiments that we harbour in our hearts, are the chisels with which we are carving out our faces and those ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... cigar-case," said Dick, bursting into a guffaw. "I wonder whether—yes—five!" he added, as he opened the case and saw five cigars tucked in side by side and kept in their places by a leather band. "What a game! I'll smug it and keep it for ever so long. He ought ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... respectable. He had hated the smug, self-satisfied merchants of Grand Avenue. He had writhed in torture at the sight of every shiny, purring automobile that had ever passed him with its load of well-groomed men and women. A clean, stiff collar was to Billy as a red rag ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... guessed because they were all quite sure what Alligator had done. They went out in a body to look for him. He lay beside the barn with his eyes shut and a smug smile on his face. Muffled grunts and squeals sounded from ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... didn't, but that doesn't make it any less ugly. I quite understand that people can't always have nice things, but at least they needn't have things that are merely grotesque. What do you say? I can think of nothing more devastating, more utterly smug than that hideous style—cabinets covered all over with ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... of the cheapest things in all the world. The price of war never can be paid in gold. Not in national treasuries can you see the payment of that price, where smug, well-groomed politicians sign bonds and bills of credit. If you would see the payment of that price of war, you must go to the place of war. With all your senses open, step upon the battlefield. Smell the smoke of burning powder, the reek of charging ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. It is to be doubted strongly if the average bourgeois, smug and fat and prosperous, can understand this man Foma Gordyeeff. The rebellion in his blood is something to which their own does not thrill. To them it will be inexplicable that this man, with his health and his millions, could not go on living as his class ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... do our talking under a heavy handicap. Homer, long ago, found us garrulous, and compared us to cicadas chirping unprofitably in the city-gate. In the modern time, too, Dr. Holmes, ensconced in smug youth, could "sit and grin" at one of ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... an interval of disorder. But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way. The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction. The speech undeniably falls fiat. Will no one restore the tone ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... scuttled to her appointed place. Once More in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the things they say, as the way they say them! Do you not recall the smug, confident look, the assurance of having said a particularly happy thing? They come inevitably as the alarm clock; when the hands of circumstance touch the hour, the bromidic remark ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... a smug smile. For hadn't he risen gloriously from Thieves Row to director of famed U.T.? Was not Earth, Moon, and all the Belt, at this very moment awaiting his command for the grand coup? And wasn't his cousin-from-Montehedo ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... are usually exceedingly busy in calculating the chances of a huge fight—indeed they spend a good part of each year in that pleasing employment. Smug diplomatists talk glibly about "war clearing the air;" and the crowd—the rank and file—chatter as though war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere harmless hurly-burly where certain battalions receive thrashings of a trifling nature. It ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... another school at Beckenham. They're stinkers. Put on no end of side because some smug of theirs won a schol' at Uppingham last term. But we beat ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... turned and surveyed the hall and the library beyond. A new portrait of Natalie was there, hanging on the wall under a shaded light, and she wandered in, still with her cigaret, and surveyed it. Natalie had everything. The portrait showed it. It was beautiful, smug, complacent. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... only the negative conditions for good political institutions. When they have been won, we need also the positive condition: encouragement of creative energy. Security alone might produce a smug and stationary society; it demands creativeness as its counterpart, in order to keep alive the adventure and interest of life, and the movement toward perpetually new and better things. There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... results—are practically identical. They are virtually in complete agreement. Now, the strange thing is this: their conclusions are wrong in every instance" (here I nearly laughed aloud, for, as I glanced at the two experts, the expression of smug satisfaction on their countenances changed with lightning rapidity to a ludicrous spasm of consternation); "not sometimes wrong and sometimes right, as would have been the case if they had made mere guesses, but wrong every time. When they are quite ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... slipped and strained its tendons—stamped all his dealings, even in the butter line; and facts having furnished a creditable motive for his rash reliance upon his own cord, he turned amid applause to the pleasant pastimes of a smug church-warden. And when he was wafted to a still sublimer sphere, his grandson carried on ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... was tired. He bowed, and I did not dispute the mandate, although I would rather have remained with her, and got to know something of the nature that lay behind those gray passionless features, than turn to the society of that smug-looking young gentleman who waited so respectfully, like a ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He objected to cheeks "scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, and to "terror-stricken" wagons. The very ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... the door of his house to meet him on his return. It was a rash vow, I am ready to admit. Yet rash as it was, I do not find it in my heart to be severely critical of him. I rather join with Dr. Peck in my admiration. You know what is the matter with a great many of us smug church members? We are so prudent. We have such admirable possession of all our faculties. We are in danger of dying of self-control. This man in the white heat of his enthusiasm made a solemn pledge to ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... an overtone of weariness. "There is no need to be smug," he told Jonas. "After all, you did not do the ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... competitor in Dick Derosne. In fact, neither of the young men was capable of appreciating the attractions of the other: Dick considering Norburn very doubtfully a gentleman, and very certainly what in his University days he dubbed a "smug"; Norburn regarding him with the rather impatient contempt that such a man is apt to bestow on those for whom dressing themselves and amusing themselves are the chief labours of a day. Moreover, Norburn did not frequent dances, and young men who do not frequent ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... view, we see his body is almost bare, except a few fluttering rags of shirt that still remain about him. The other day I saw Tama at the township, elaborately attired in black broadcloth and white linen and all the rest of it, looking a perfect picture of smug respectability and aged innocence. Now here he is, grasping a tomahawk in his sinewy hand, with a knife held between his teeth, and—albeit 'tis only a boar he is attacking—with a fire dancing in his eyes like that which shone ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too warm ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... deliver thee, and make thee rich, and heal thy hurts, save the holes in thy ears, that I may know thee for mine own." But Daniel gave no heed to him. So the Devil departed, having great wrath, and entered into a certain smug-faced man standing by. ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... unknown. Our life and our food were simple and rugged; but the keen air, the relief from luxury, the novelty and the wonder, wrought upon my companion and renewed him, so that presently I was amused to note in him signs of a moral preening—some smug resumption of that arrogant air of superiority that is ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Captain Douglas says they seemed pretty smug. They may try it again. By the way, Jerry says the film will be ready at five tomorrow night. I'll send him into New York early tomorrow and he can do a few errands for me, then pick up the film on ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... smug. It's just another worldful of people with the same old likes, dislikes and hatreds. But they are evolving a way of living together, without violence, that may some day form the key to mankind's survival. They are worth looking after. Now get below and study your Disan and read the reports. ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... overnight—garish husks of squalor, palpitating, hardy, a-tingle with extravagant hopes. A few, it is true, lived to become substantial cities buzzing with the American spirit, panting, fighting for progress with an energy that shamed the Old World, lethargic in its smug and self-sufficient superiority. But many towns died in their gangling youth, tragic monuments to hopes; but monuments also to effort, and to the pioneer courage and the ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... starlight had illuminated only a small portion of its white facade, tricking him; for this was almost a palace—one of those fine vigorously designed mansions, so imposing in simplicity, nicknamed by smug ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... little party of a dozen, not including Herr Kupferkram and the Frau, who will insist upon waiting on us. There is the smug master-butcher from round the corner, who has a very becoming sense of his own position in society; two mild-spoken bookseller's clerks, who scarcely find their voices till the evening is far advanced; my friend and fellow-tramp ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... in no smug complacency, listened to this man, respected him and supported him, and on his death a number of people were glad to unite to endow a lectureship in his honor in ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... "Chosen People" in literature. It was Leslie Stephen who said, "The term Philistine is a word used by prigs to designate people they do not like." When you call a man a bad name, you are that thing—not he. The Smug and Snugly Ensconced Denizens of Union Square called me a Philistine, and I said, "Yes, I am one, if a Philistine is something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of events turns our sternest resolves to ridicule. On the next street-corner was a hair-dresser's shop, its genial little proprietor, plump and smug, rubbing his hands and smiling in the doorway. Beholding the commanding figure of the yellow-bearded young aristocrat, afar off, his professional mouth watered over him. What a harvest for shears and razor was here! Dare he hope ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Dutchmen, each with a little world of his own, and forming the sole orbit of that little world. For the most part they were plantation owners escaping the seasonal heat for the cool breezes of a vacation in Japan, boastful of their possessions, smug in their Dutch self-complacency, and somewhat gluttonous in ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... everybody's friend, and looked upon no one as beyond the pale. He loved sinners and welcomed them, without in the least condoning what was wrong. He looked upon the open and acknowledged sinner as a more hopeful person from the religious point of view than the person who was self-satisfied and smug. He said that He came to seek and to save those who knew themselves to ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... so queer? I don't like you. Be nice to me." There was something terribly wrong with the smug little phrases, or with any words at all just then, there in the heart of the silent dark, and facing the strangeness of the boy's eyes; words failed her suddenly, and she pulled her hands away, and hid her face in them. "I won't go with you—I'll ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... having delivered its last ball, shut itself off with a smug click. Stanton turned away from the handball court and walked toward the physical therapist, who held out a robe ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dynamic and dangerous people who not only think independently themselves, but have the power to make other people think. No one who came in contact with him escaped this; it seemed to crackle electrically in the air around him; he was a sort of human thought-conductor, and he shocked many a smug and self-satisfied citizen into horrific life before he ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... "Honest thought! Yes! Where? In your study. That's where you theorists do your mischief. You can't make laws for the people in your study. You can't tell the status of the workingman from the figures you read in your study. You're like half the smug people in the world who discuss this question in the railway carriages and in their clubs. I've heard 'em till I'd like to shove their self-opinionated arguments down their throats, strip their clothes off their backs, and send them down to live with my pals, or starve with them. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... widie. That's got it. Good idee. Very good idee. Charity and business—what they like. Micky Mahon, his name was. Died o'—I must have it all pat on the tongue. What did he die of, Brand? You're an artful little feller, settin' there so smug and secret like a hen crocodile a-hatchin' ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... Englishmen bear the stamp of the Public Schools upon them and have made England what she is. Smug-faced missionaries grow fat on the spoils they have collected from smug-faced church-and-chapel-goers at home. Labour Members are in the pay of Germany and frequent infamous flats in the West-End. Liberal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... these smug people who have been taught what to admire! These unborn souls who want to shut us all up in the dark! I suppose he went away thinking I put myself up higher than Raphael. Who are we painting for? ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... him. A solitary Earl's Court omnibus that lumbered past with its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be a spectacle absolutely tragic—he did not know why. The few wayfarers were obviously prim and smug. No joy, no elegance, anywhere! Only, at intervals, a feeling that mysterious and repulsive wealth was hiding itself like an ogre in the eternal twilight of fastnesses beyond the stuccoed walls and the grimy curtains.... The city worked six days in order to be precisely this on the seventh. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... his table, and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hieropath. The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet, and a rakish cap decorated with white satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore an embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... suspicion and pride are only fear; that the rascally acts of others are perhaps, in the queer webwork of human relations, due to some calousness of our own. Who knows? Some man may have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we looked so intolerably smug in Philadelphia! ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... morning they were all very stiff, but glad of the sun on sagebrush and river, and the boy and girl sang over breakfast. While Milt was gathering fuel he looked up at Claire standing against a background of rugged hills, her skirt and shoes still smug, but her jacket off, her blouse turned in at the throat, her hair blowing, her sleeves rolled up, one hand on her hip, erect, charged with vigor—the ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the music; but I'm not blind now. I understand many things that were hidden from the plain girl from the West. I have lived a year in every day. I see as they are these people I have thought so kind. So rich I call them now; so smug, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... of common shops, full of common things, the blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a horrible stucco parody of a Greek temple with a facade of hideous columns that was a nightmare, villas like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in cheap Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by the builder, these were the pictures of the way. When he got home again he flung himself on the bed, and lay there ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... were answered as Christ would answer it, there would be no smug respectabilities scoffing at the striker. There would be no heartless scabs taking the places of men struggling to ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... of Betty Vivian, Fanny was rather a favorite at Haddo Court. She was certainly not the least bit original. She was prim and smug and self-satisfied to the last degree, but she always did the right thing in the right way. She always looked pretty, and no one ever detected any fault in her. Her mistresses trusted her, and some of the girls thought it worth their while to ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... brought a tart or a triangle of layer cake with her school luncheon, because on those days she forsook the cheerful society of her mates and sought a safe solitude in the woods, returning after a time with a jocund smile on her smug face. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... can abandon its navy and agree to arbitrate all questions of all kinds with every foreign power. In such event it can afford to pass its spare time in one continuous round of universal peace celebrations, and of smug self-satisfaction in having earned the derision of all the virile peoples of mankind. Those who advocate such a policy do not occupy a lofty position. But at least their position ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their proteges for the authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its 'taxables', chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind. Most certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes in ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... to Europe on his vacation when the coal cases first came up.... Besides, it would have made no difference. I think I see in it the fine hand of our good friend the Senator,—smug-faced old fox!" ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... to the pitch of hysterical rage, ready to vent itself at the first excuse. The sight of the girl, fresh-skinned from a wash in the river, instead of soothing, further inflamed him. Her glowing well-being seemed bought at his expense. Her words of concern spoke to his sick ear with a note of smug, ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... deal of confusion was generated from the contradictions between Rodale's self-righteous and sometimes scientifically vague positions and the amused defenses of the smug scientific community. Donald Hopkins' Chemicals, Humus and the Soil is the best, most humane, and emotionally generous defense against the extremism of Rodale. Hopkins makes hash of many organic principles while still upholding the vital ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... attempt at grace, it threw over the style of the "Newcastle School"—of which Landells was a member—and gave the general idea of the latest of all covers. This was not executed until January, 1849, when several changes of detail were made, including the substitution of the smug lion's head for that of Judy in the canvas—the whole so successful that it may safely be predicted that it will ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... does not make him less interesting as a figure in that amusing literarified society; and we may be glad to see him in Parma with Signor Torelli's eyes, as he "issues smug, ornate, with his well-fitting, polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking, his whole immaculate person, and his demure visage, and, gently sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes his way toward ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... The adolescent Emperor, or his cool Complacent Chancellor? COMINIUS! Unseasoned youth, or untried middle-age, A shouting boy, or a sleek-spoken elder, Hot stripling, cool supplanter! I serve not "Under COMINIUS," nay!—yet since he stands There, where I made firm footing amidst chaos, Stands in smug comfort where we Titans struggled— MOLTKE, and I, and the great Emperor,— Struggled for vantage, which he owes to us;— Since he stands there, and I in shadow sit, Silenced and chidden, I half feel I serve, Whom he would bid to second. Second him, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... about that snuffy old Scotchman—a man behind his day, who had rusted and grown old among the soft diseases of Carlingford, where sharp practice was so seldom necessary; and no opening appeared for young Rider except in the new district, in the smug corner house, with the surgery and the red lamp, and M.R.C.S. on a ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Life and Death of the merry Devill of Edmonton, with the pleasant Prancks of Smug the smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the stealing of Venison, frontispiece, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... will my whiskers curl so tight? My cheeks grow smug and muttony? My face become so red and white? My coat so ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... far away. But this was long before you took your malaria of mosquitoes, and we minded them no more than little children mind them to-day. Indeed, I can keep peacefully still even now to watch a mosquito batten and fatten upon my hand, to see his ravenous, pale abdomen swell to a vast smug redness—that physiological, or psychological, moment for which you wait ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Griper, a pair Who stick to Lord Mulesby like leeches; A smug chaplain of plausible air, Who writes my Lord Goslingham's speeches. Dr. Buzz, who alone is a host, Who, with arguments weighty as lead, Proves six times a week in the Post That flesh ...
— English Satires • Various
... nude not a dozen feet away, Doree grasped Mike's arm. He glanced across and saw that her eyes were sweeping past Katal'halee to the small cabin. Its door had again opened. Two men emerged and moved forward. They seemed entirely at home and wore smug smiles. ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... enough to have to flatter Clayton's opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man, attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy; but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him worse—disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... in Part XVI., page 541. It is a scene in which the four martyrs, Bland, Frankesh, Sheterden, and Middleton, condemned by the Bishop of Dover, 25th June 1555, are shown being burned at the stakes. One of the martyrs certainly looks intensely smug with his hands folded as if he were at grace before a favourite dinner. Yes, du Maurier certainly failed to attain quite to the heights of the horror ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... through the spruce forests of the Selkirks and fail to glean at least some slight degree of wilderness knowledge. Both Virginia and Lounsbury had been on horseback before. Virginia had ridden in the parks of her native city: long ago and far away a barefoot, ragged boy—much to be preferred to the smug and petulant man who now tried to hard to forget those humble days—had bestrode an old plow horse nightly on the way to a watering trough. But this riding had qualities all its own. There was no open road winding before them. Nor was there any ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... for a moment; then he grew thoughtful, then sad; and when he heard me tell Dowley I should have Dickon, the boss mason, and Smug, the boss wheelwright, out there, too, the coal-dust on his face turned to chalk, and he lost his grip. But I knew what was the matter with him; it was the expense. He saw ruin before him; he judged that his financial days were numbered. However, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... rollicking, headstrong James, "and we will roast the Crichton on a spit and hang that smug traitor, Tutor Livingston, over the walls of David's Tower, a bonny ferlie for ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I 'll pay no calls. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... drolatiques;' although, like 'Don Juan,' they contain a great deal of what was best in their author, of his frank, ebullient, sensuous nature, lighted up here at least by a genuine if scarcely delicate humor. Of direct suggestion of vice Balzac was, naturally, as incapable as he was of smug puritanism; but it must be confessed that as a raconteur his proper audience, now that the monastic orders have passed away, would be a group of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... John, no doubt, carried off medals, prizes, certificates of merit, and everything else which could be obtained in Muirtown Seminary by a lad who played no games and swatted all evening at next day's work. The town was weary of seeing Thomas John and his brother—each wearing the same smug expression, and each in faultlessly neat attire—processing up in turn to receive their honours from the hands of the Lord Provost, and the town would cheer with enthusiasm when Duncan Robertson made ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... I wanted to strike the smug Pharisee in the face, and in order to conquer that unwomanly impulse I hurried out of the office, and into the street, leaving poor ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Serving for a laborer's lamp? Have the same mists another side, To be the appanage of pride, Gracing the rich man's wood and lake, His park where amber mornings break, And treacherously bright to show His planted isle where roses glow? O Day! and is your mightiness A sycophant to smug success? Will the sweet sky and ocean broad Be fine accomplices to fraud? O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray! Back, back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... fraud; even the little storekeepers, with their smug pretensions to homely honesty, were profiting by some of the vilest, basest forms of fraud, such as robbing the poor by the light-weight and short-weight trick, [Footnote: These forms of cheating exist at present to a greater extent than ever before. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... one slowly between her teeth again; it had an extraordinary bitter taste which remained in the mouth. She hated the packet of sweets for its smug, silly ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... asphalt of the Boulevard. A morocco book, a sheet of vellum, and a pencil, are before us. We write a dozen lines, and hand them to our companion; he reads, nods approval, and transfers the precious document to the smug and expectant waiter. The sharp eye of that Ganymede of the Gilt House had at once detected our Britannic origin, conspicuous in our sober garb and shaven chins; and doubtless he anticipated one of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... at a nuptial feast, still making a noise, still rolling, still buzzing and cracking. Believe me, sir, in that consisteth none of my least good fortunes. And my wife will be jocund, feat, compt, neat, quaint, dainty, trim, tricked up, brisk, smirk, and smug, even as a pretty little Cornish chough. Who will not believe this, let hell or the gallows be the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... who masquerade excitedly as eunuchs and as wives of eunuchs (they have their excuses, of course, and who knows but the masquerade is somewhat unnecessary); to the pedantic ones who barricade themselves heroically behind their own belchings; to the smug ones who walk with their noses ecstatically buried in their own rectums (I have nothing against them, I swear); to the righteous ones who masturbate blissfully under the blankets of their perfections; to the righteous ones who finger each other in the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... taking his eyes from the smug face of the man, swung one of the buckets and let drive at him. It missed. But he had got his range, and the next bucket knocked off the scoop hat. When the Cap'n scrambled to his feet, loaded with the bed-wrench for his next volley, ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... was nearly forty years old, he made his first literary hit with Sartor Resartus which called out a storm of caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug English public regarded with reverence—all these features aroused irritation. Four years later came The French Revolution, which established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers. From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... I have another bad match: a bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar, that used to come so smug upon the mart; let him look to his bond: he was wont to call me usurer; let him look to his bond: he was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy; let him look to ...
— The Merchant of Venice • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... Miss Earle retorted inelegantly, and with ghoulish satisfaction. "Money can do anything! It makes my blood simply boil when I think of how those Forsyte girls in Hamilton—so smug and snobbish in their hick town 'society'—must be running poor Nita down, now that she's dead and can't defend herself!... If the truth were only known about ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... "Smug it!" said Mercer, with a comical look, "when he knew. Look! see that open ground there with the clump of fir-trees and the long slope of sand going ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... hall, hotel, or hut? If in an inn, nobody interferes with you in meddling officiousness; neither landlord, bagman, waiter, chambermaid, boots;—you are left to yourself without being neglected. Your bell may not be emulously answered by all the menials on the establishment, but a smug or shock-headed drawer appears in good time; and if mine host may not always dignify your dinner by the deposition of the first dish, yet, influenced by the rumour that soon spreads through the premises, he bows farewell at your departure, with a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... travesty of the somewhat pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty Tommy, as Mr. Sambourne has realised them. The "Anecdotes of the Crocodile" and "The Presumptuous Dentist" are no less good. The way he has turned a prosaic hat-rack into an instrument ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White |
