"Self-satisfied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the self-satisfied look upon the restaurant-keeper's face, that the hot-tempered man supposed that he had done a very smart thing in thus disposing of Matt's wares by throwing the bundle into the muddy gutter ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... peculiar devil-may-care recklessness about the self-satisfied swagger of his gait, and the free and easy glance of his sharp black eye, united with a temper that nothing could ruffle, and a courage nothing could daunt. With such qualities as these, he had been the prime favourite ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... by the entrance of Mr. Blaisdell, with a fine lot of ore samples with their assay values attached, which he arranged on his desk, his thin lips drawn back meanwhile in his accustomed self-satisfied smile. When this was done, he turned to the ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... you very well. But do not deny that you might have saved her. Why did you not?" Ram Lal smiled a strange smile, which I should have described as self-satisfied, had it not been ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... hard if he happens to be no bigger than you are!" Mashurina retorted with a self-satisfied smile. (She had quite recently passed her examination as a midwife. Coming from a poor aristocratic family, she had left her home in the south of Russia about two years before, and with about twelve shillings ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... the barn it was already half dark. On one side the hay rose up in a tremendous heap almost to the roof, where it vanished dimly in the dusky shadows. Opposite were the cow-stables, five of them in a row, each occupant munching her cud contentedly and now and then giving vent to a soft, self-satisfied low. From one of the stalls could be heard the rhythmical squirt of milk against the milking-pail, for David was engaged upon his evening work. On a rickety chair near the hay-loft sat Janet, holding a timid little barn ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... packages which prevented their owner from appearing so completely the absorbed businessman which he flattered himself that he seemed. Then the partnership was formed one evening in Parson Wedgewell's own church, in the presence of a host of witnesses, Fred appearing as self-satisfied and radiant as the gainer in such transactions always does, while Esther's noble face and drooping eyes showed beyond doubt who it ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... followed him here! He dressed himself with feverish haste, not, however, without a certain care of his appearance and some selection of apparel, and quickly forecast the forthcoming interview in his mind. For the pendulum had swung back; Mr. James Smith was once more the self-satisfied, self-complacent, and discreetly cautious husband that he had been at the beginning of his quest, perhaps with a certain sense of grievance superadded. He should require the fullest explanations and guarantees ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... lady, with a self-satisfied air: 'here, at least, one can forget one has the misfortune ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... therefore, that the house would suspend their judgment; at the same time declaring, that if he had committed a fault in drawing out the plan of the expedition, he was ready to answer for it. He made this declaration in such a cold, self-satisfied tone, that it drew down upon his head the most bitter inventive from members of the opposition. Barre, Luttrell, Burke, Townshend, and Fox, all, in their turns, assailed the haughty secretary, and revelled in descriptions of the loss and disgrace which we had sustained—necessarily, from chagrin, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... has depicted the ordinary attitude of a self-satisfied burgher not only in Holland but in other countries also. "What does it matter if we are annexed afterwards, so long as we remain neutral now?" That is the sort of speech made by selfish merchants in some of the neutral countries, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... Harry Annesley to say in answer to such an address as this? There was the man, stretched on his bed before him, haggard, unshaved, pale, and grizzly, with a fire in his eyes, but weakness in his voice,—bold, defiant, self-satisfied, and yet not selfish. He had lived through his life with the one strong resolution of setting the law at defiance in reference to the distribution of his property; but chiefly because he had thought the law to be unjust. Then, when the accident of his eldest son's extravagance had fallen upon ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... aware of two men who were reeling toward him under the influence of this drug-like intoxication, and he was startled by a likeness which one of them bore to some one he had seen; but where, and under what circumstances, he could not determine. The fatuous eye, the features of complacent vanity and self-satisfied reverie were there, either intensified by drink, or perhaps suggesting it through some other equally hopeless form of hallucination. He turned and followed the man, trying to identify him through his companion, who appeared to be a petty tradesman of a ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... very fine, Burgess? Because I go where youth and beauty chase the shining hours with flying feet. Oh yes, Burgess, the fair and frail will be present, also the dashing and self-satisfied. And we'll try to make it agreeable all around, won't we? . . . And don't smoke all my most expensive cigars, Burgess. I may want one when I return. I hate to ask too much of you, but you won't mind leaving ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... self-satisfied "I-told-you-so" horror written on the faces of Mrs. Berry and her friends, who stood a little farther off whispering and nodding, and if she had felt the slightest hesitation, she hesitated ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... he, with a short, crisp, self-satisfied laugh. "None of your blessed squirming now. Keep still. You'll get out of your coffin, you bounder, as soon as out of my grip. Got you, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... of the human race and a tenth of the habitable globe entirely to herself, with no neighbours who had anything that she really cared for. It was inevitable, therefore, that a naturally conservative people should become a self- centred and self-satisfied people. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... a notary than as belonging to the royalist society of Bordeaux, Solonet had conceived for that fine setting sun one of those passions which women like Madame Evangelista repulse, although flattered and graciously allowing them to exist upon the surface. Solonet remained therefore in a self-satisfied condition of hope and becoming respect. Being sent for, he arrived the next morning with the promptitude of a slave and was received by the coquettish widow in her bedroom, where she allowed him to find her in a ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... plenty more where it came from"—tapping his head with his finger, and taking occasion at the same time to cant his morion over his right ear, which gave him a very self-satisfied air—"I do not need to borrow my ideas, like ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... At first he failed to recognise the photograph, but when it was explained by the pointed allusion to a living Maltese-cross spider close at hand, a gleam of intelligence brightened his bewildered face, and he delivered a self-satisfied dissertation on the order Arachnida that ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... tea parties, the utmost propriety and dignity prevailed,—no flirting nor coquetting; no romping of young ladies; no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen, with their brains in their pockets, nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements [Footnote: Divertisements: diversions, amusements.] of smart young gentlemen, with no ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... and at the marquis with an air of disquietude; but the self-satisfied, knowing look of her lover reassured her. She laughed in her sleeve with me as if she would console me as well as she could, without lowering herself in ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... think I liked you better before. I don't think I like you with this touch of aureole. People seem to me so horribly self-satisfied when they get a change of heart—they take such a fearful lot of credit to themselves on the ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... critical studies, 'The Ballad of the White Horse' the best of his poems, there is, I think, little doubt that this strange theological exposition, 'The Ball and the Cross,' is the best of his novels. It should be read by all rationalists, by all self-satisfied Christians, by all heretics, by those who are orthodox, and, above all, it should be read by those millions who pass St. Paul's Cathedral and seldom if ever give a thought to the 'Ball and the Cross' that has made the title of Chesterton's ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... have seen more of this war and other wars than Miss Addams, and I know all war to be wicked, wasteful, and unintelligent, and where Miss Addams can furnish one argument in favor of peace I will furnish a hundred. But against this insult, flung by a complacent and self-satisfied woman at men who gave their lives for men, I protest. And I believe that with me are all those women and men ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... a clean-cut idea to your name. And a kid of seventeen as self-satisfied as you are isn't worth ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... George Turnbull, the son of the principal partner, occupied in leisurely folding and putting aside a number of things he had been showing to a farmer's wife, who was just gone. He was an ordinary-looking lad, with little more than business in his high forehead, fresh-colored, good-humored, self-satisfied cheeks, and keen hazel eyes. These last kept wandering from his not very pressing occupation to the other side of the shop, where stood, behind the opposing counter, a young woman, in attendance upon the wants of a well-dressed youth in front ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... as a rule, far to go to discover these others. They are in us and of us; they wait for us to address them. They are not idle, notwithstanding their silence. Amid the noise and babble of the crowd they are tranquilly directing a portion of our real life; and, as they are nearer to truth than their self-satisfied sisters, they will often be far more simple, and far more ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... demanded no originality of intellect, no greatness of soul. If these were found, well; but she could love, tenderly and truly, where they were not. But for a worldly character, however gifted, she felt and expressed something very like contempt. At this period, she had no patience with self-satisfied mediocrity. She afterwards learned patience and unlearned contempt; but at the time of which I write, she seemed, and was to the multitude, a haughty and supercilious person,—while to those whom she loved, she was all the more gentle, tender ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... dice" to the Maestro,' said the Senator, taking a seat. 'A little composition of my own,' he added, with a self-satisfied smile, for the musician's information. 'I have taught ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... promenading through the crowd with a proud and self-satisfied air, the peasants were secretly laughing and jeering ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... known from one end of the earth to the other that I am a most cunning man," Muchini went on, stroking his muscular arm, a trick of self-satisfied men in their moments of complacence; "and whilst even the old men slept, I, Koosoogolaba-Muchini, the son of the terrible and crafty G'sombo, the brother of Eleni-N'gombi, I went abroad with my wise men and my ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... it was safe to say that every drink he had he paid for. His eyes got brighter and his complexion clearer, nor was he as pleased as one of the other sex might have been when the self-satisfied Henshaw pointed out these improvements to his companions, and claimed entire responsibility for them. It is probable that Mr. Lister, under these circumstances, might in time have lived down his taste for strong drink, but that at just that time ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... securely tethered (Tony had attended to that), were innocently nibbling mountain herbs. There was no obvious reason why, as he lighted a cigarette and stretched himself on the parapet, Tony should not have been the most self-satisfied guide in the world. He had not only completed the expedition in safety, but had saved the heroine's life by the way; and even if the heroine did not appear as thankful as she might, still, her father had shown due gratitude, ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... mean? I stared and wondered, till, out of the confusion, there gradually grew shapes which bore some resemblance to human beings, and, presently, I could recognize quite distinctly, first a young man in knee breeches, smiling in a particularly self-satisfied way, and escorting a large fish, who was walking upright, with slippers on his tail, and who wore a waistcoat and necktie. Then an amiable-looking old gentleman, carrying a wand, who was followed by a curious little person, wearing a crown and carrying ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... hoarse laugh, and twirling his moustachios, while his countenance wore the expression of a person about to swallow a nauseous draught, he walked across the room towards the crucifix. The marquis followed, with a self-satisfied look, as if he had achieved a victory. It is not necessary to repeat the oath taken by the pirate, or to describe the final arrangements entered into between the ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... at. And now I should like to ask, WHO taught him all this?—and me, through him, that the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... O Lord!"—A third lesson our texts teach is that it is to the humble and contrite that the revival is promised. We want the revival to come upon the proud and the self-satisfied, to break them down and save them. God will give this, but only on the condition that those who see and feel the sin of others take their burden of confession and bear it, and that all who pray for and claim in faith God's reviving power for His Church, shall humble themselves with ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... at any rate, since the Reform Act of 1832, "done what it liked," in a style not quite so grand but excessively comfortable and self-satisfied. It had carried some great reforms on which it had set its heart. It had established, enormously to its profit, Free Trade, and it had accumulated vast wealth. Its maxim had been—"Every man for ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... sentiments within us, and our delivery of them, are apt to dwindle and shrink even below the natural elevation when we look back on them from the hither shore of the river of sleep—in other words, wake in the morning: and it was with no very self-satisfied emotions that Evan, dressing by the full light of day, reviewed his share in the events of the preceding night. Why, since he had accepted his fate, should he pretend to judge the conduct of people his superiors in rank? And where was the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Richard had been prudence itself in his behavior to Harry—but because the miner could not comprehend the young fellow, and therefore distrusted him. The light and airy manners, which were as natural to Richard as was John Trevethick's ponderous cunning or his own self-satisfied reticence, seemed to Solomon mere affectation, and even his appearance effeminate and dandified; but when he saw that he wore no other air when conversing with the pitmen of Dunloppel—an expedition undertaken with himself at Richard's special ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... female that comes along, even after the season of courtship is over and the matches are all settled; and when she leads him on too wild a chase, he turns, lightly about and breaks out with a song is precisely analogous to a burst of gay and self-satisfied laughter, as much as to say, "Ha! ha! ha! I must have my fun, Miss Silverthimble, thimble, thimble, if I break every heart in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... quiet self-satisfied laugh. Then he commenced the second letter, type-written like the first, but evidently ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... there was one to whom the sermon was a fiery ordeal. For even Donald, well-nigh crushed with the weight of his grief and the knowledge of all he had missed, was no more torn by the old clergyman's words than the young minister who sat reviewing his past self-satisfied year in Glenoro in the light of Duncan ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... Etrurian (non-Aryan) civilization on which the Latins intruded, was apparently more advanced than their own. For centuries their utmost prowess scarce sufficed to maintain their independence. Thus it was not possible for them to become too self-satisfied, to stand afar off and look down on their neighbors with Grecian scorn. The ego was less prominently developed; the necessity of mutual dependence and united action was more deeply taught. Their records display less of brilliancy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... branches of the tree above the well-fed, self-satisfied witch-doctor. He made no noise that the dull ears of man could hear above the soughing of the gentle jungle breeze among the undulating foliage of the upper terraces, and when he came close above the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ironist twisted his mouth. "It will be many a day ere sleep makes contest with my eyes . . . unless it be cold and sinister sleep. Sleep? You are laughing! Only the fatuous and the self-satisfied sleep . . . and the dead. So be it." He took the tongs and stirred the log, from which flames suddenly darted. "I wonder what they are doing at Voisin's to-night?" irrelevantly. "There will be some from the guards, some from ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... everything that was 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 to a bull. Cleanliness, success, opulence, decency, spelled but ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... moustache twirled up into points, and as black as jet, by a full imperial, by whiskers carefully combed, and a forest of black hair in some disorder. He was whisking a riding whip with an air of ease and freedom which suited his self-satisfied expression and the elegance of his dress; the ribbons attached to his button-hole were carelessly tied, and he seemed to pride himself much more on his smart appearance than on his courage. Augustine looked at the Duchesse de Carigliano, and indicated the Colonel by a sidelong glance. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... this time with a care as unresting as the care of mother or stepfather, bosom friend or plighted lover. This person was Ann Woolper. Mrs. Woolper had come to the villa prepared to find in Miss Halliday a frivolous self-satisfied young person, between whom and an old broken-down woman like herself there could be no sympathy. She had expected to be contemptuously—or, at the best, indifferently—entreated by the prosperous well-placed young lady, whom Mr. Sheldon ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... proud only of the things that were unlike other American things; a Boston that would rather perish by fire and sword than be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, and reluctant Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly self-satisfied in so far as it was not in the least the Boston of her fond preconceptions. It was, doubtless, no more the real Boston we know and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It made ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... Self-satisfied, Marie Berard smiles in her cat-like way as she thinks of a nice little house in Paris. Its income will support her. She will nurse this situation with care. It ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... disappeared in regions of which I knew nothing and whither even my daring imagination presumed not to follow. And the vision never left my eyes nor her form my heart, and I went out in my turn, a burning, eager, determined man, where in a short half hour before I had entered cold and self-satisfied, without hope and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... zeal, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which He gives in early youth! It is so easy to become more thick-skinned in conscience, more tolerant of evil, more hopeless of good, more careful of one's own comfort and one's own property, more self-satisfied in leaving high aims and great deeds to enthusiasts, and then to believe that one is growing older and wiser. And yet those high examples, those good works, those great triumphs over evil, which single hands effect sometimes, we are all grateful for, when they are done, whatever ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... hour; and had there been any one there to see, he might have been observed to shake the contents of a little paper, a fine white powder, into the water carafe which stood filled upon the wash-stand in Seabrooke's alcove. Then, with the self-satisfied air of one who has accomplished a great feat, he stole from the room and back ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... him. It was Adriana's first visit to Paris, and she seemed delighted with it; but Mrs. Neuchatel preferred the gay capital when it was out of season. Mr. Neuchatel himself was always in high spirits,—sanguine and self-satisfied. He was an Orleanist, had always been so, and sympathised with the apparently complete triumph of his principles—"real liberal principles, no nonsense; there was more gold in the Bank of France than in any similar establishment in Europe. After all, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... "You're a self-satisfied prig," retorted Burns. "Hullo! Somebody's coming. Tell me what to do, Martha. Do I run to meet them and rush them up to Ellen, or do I display a studied indifference? I never 'received' at ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... said with a self-satisfied manner, that my cousin was a little too apt to assume when property became the subject of conversation. I had occasion several times that day, even, to remark that he attached a high value to money; though, at the ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... hearing a brisk voice, "Then it was a human picaninny, after all! Well, my dear, what are you doing here?" Dot turned her head without moving, and saw a little way behind her a brown bird on long legs, standing with its feet close together, with the self-satisfied air of a dancing master about to ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... a cordial note, I called upon John Hay one morning. He received me in a little room off the main hall of his house, whose spaciousness made him seem diminutive. He struck me as a dapper man, noticeably, but not offensively, self-satisfied. His fine black beard was streaked with white, but his complexion was youthfully clear. Though undersized he was compact and sturdy, and his voice ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... sort of letter-obedience, a formal obedience to the vision you have. In one's own estimation, there may seem to be a knowledge of what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.[102] We're so much better ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... feature of her face is disturbed, or seems ever to have been subject to emotion. The Italian Aphrodite looks up, her face all quivering and burning with passion and wasting anxiety. The Greek one is quiet, self-possessed, and self-satisfied: the Italian incapable of rest; she has had no thought nor care for herself; her hair has been bound by a fillet like the Greek's; but it is now all fallen loose, and clotted with the sea, or clinging to her ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... absolute trust. Only by showing confidence in him can we hope to do away with the dangers of the whole incident. To inculcate good habits and encourage good behaviour we must let the child build up his own reputation for these virtues. It need not make him priggish or self-satisfied if parents let him understand that they take pride in seeing him practise and develop the virtue they aim at. For example, it is desired above all that he should always speak the truth. Then they must ostentatiously ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... and a self-satisfied smile, he followed Mrs. Hamilton into her "private office," as she sometimes ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the self-satisfied dauber twice, not without some admiring glances at the way in which he was plastering the background of his landscape with indigo, by way of making a sky. At top of the sign, now nearly finished, was traced, in large characters, 'Break of Day;' a precaution as indispensable to point out the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... old town, full of intelligence and vitality, but also full of patrician pride, self-contained, and self-satisfied. There was a bourgeois aristocracy with a taste for work and the higher culture, but narrow and pietistic, who were calmly convinced of their own superiority and the superiority of their city, and quite content to live in family isolation. There were enormous families ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... relieved. He unpinned the huge cluster of violets on his coat and laid them down on the sill beside her before he went. Nan flicked them off with her fingers as she watched him cross the lawn, his own self-satisfied smile upon ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... might be, it almost made me sick—it almost made me kick, to see the humorous and masculine Barty prostrate in admiration before these inspired epicenes, these gifted epileptoids, these anaemic little self-satisfied nincompoops, whose proper place, it seemed to me, was either Earlswood, or Colney Hatch, or Broadmoor. That is, if their madness was genuine, which I doubt. He and I had many a quarrel about them, till he found them out and cut them for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... to a connoisseur in compliments! He tasted it with the same self-satisfied smile that he had her first prophecy. To her who had then voiced a secret he had shared with no one, as his chest swelled with a full breath, he bared another in the delight of the impression he had ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Dantor cast a warning look in the Earth man's direction. It wouldn't do to lock horns with this self-satisfied despot; at any rate, not now. Blaine's mien was ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... antics by way of relaxation. Did he ever wriggle with merriment when he was alone? I turned suddenly at the thought. He was calmly perusing a paper through his pince-nez, with an expression of countenance at once so benign, silly, and self-satisfied, that I felt I should like to have apologised ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the need of a wife. The latter added that if he could find just the girl, he would think it over, but as matters stood he preferred certainty to chance and was taking no risks. Between ourselves, both these two are very self-satisfied and egotistical persons, and I don't think any woman has lost much by ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... anyway, was sometimes on fire with indignation when Malevsky approached her, with a sly, fox-like action, leaned gracefully on the back of her chair, and began whispering in her ear with a self-satisfied and ingratiating little smile, while she folded her arms across her bosom, looked intently at him and smiled ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... His hounds had behaved to perfection; his horse—though he had downed him three times—had carried him well, and his lordship stood with his crownless flat hat in his hand, and one coat lap in the pocket of the other—a grinning, exulting, self-satisfied specimen of a ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... red, smiling face amid its fringe of grey, the general's words, his well-cared-for face with its self-satisfied smile and the smell of wine from his breath and of cigars from his whiskers—revolted Father Sergius. He bowed again ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... "mixed." Presently Cal, stretched the long length of him in the grass, with Pink sitting comfortably upon his middle, looked up at the dizzying swim of the moon, saw new and uncharted stars, and nearer, dimly revealed in the half-light, the self-satisfied, cherubic ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... the daughter of a Salem fisherman, whose wit and charm gave Hawthorne frequent amusement; and I suppose that not seldom he reaped delightful suggestions from his meetings with frank, unconscious, and individual people of tastes and life unlike his own. I have heard it told with a polite, self-satisfied scorn, that he was in the habit of visiting now and then a tavern patronized by 'longshore-men and nautical veterans, to listen to their talk. I can well believe it, for it is this sort of intercourse that a person of manly genius, with a republican ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... in all things had been arrogant, presumptuous, and self-satisfied, had methought erred for once ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... Squire Pettijohn, hitherto complacent, self-satisfied village magnate. Now suddenly grown haggard and old, confronting that other face so curiously like his own. His son! Whose scant intelligence had always been a shame to him and because of which he had given neglect where care should have been. Whom he had been secretly ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... a customer or 'kid him along' for the amusement of a by-stander or a fellow clerk. This is a common practice in some clothing stores. The offender is usually a self-satisfied clerk who has had just enough success as a salesman to ...
— Sam Lambert and the New Way Store - A Book for Clothiers and Their Clerks • Unknown
... his son in surprise, forgetting the fact that he had been training and moulding him for years to become a self-satisfied, selfish man, with only one idea, that of taking care of himself, no ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... stupid man, an amazingly self-satisfied toiler who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... of Protestantism think that however learned they might be, still they are foolish and ignorant enough to be self-satisfied. It is doubtful whether the most elaborate sermon of a Protestant doctor smells more beautifully than incense. The most learned theologians in Germany and elsewhere have whole-heartedly supported the criminal enterprise of the warlike and criminal scientia militans. ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... fact that I should doubt whether, in the year 1919, any intelligent and educated man would be inclined to maintain that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, as contrasted with the nineteenth, ages of intellectual torpor, what startles me in these paragraphs is the self-satisfied assumption of the finality of my conclusions. I posit, as a fact not to be controverted, that our universe is an expression of an universal law, which the nineteenth century ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... by his self-satisfied complacence and after listening to a recital of how he had cornered the Klamath salmon-packing, planted the first oysters on the bay and established that lucrative monopoly, and of how, after exhausting litigation and a campaign of years he had captured the water ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... continued his way in no very self-satisfied mood. Although he did not regret having taken the place of Cressy as the purveyor of lethal weapons between the belligerent parties, he knew he was tacitly mingling in the feud between people for whom he cared little or nothing. It was true that the Harrisons sent their children to ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... with an air of most self-satisfied mystery; and then drew cautiously from under her feather cloak an object at which Amyas had hard work to keep ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... all, are you?" said Roberts now. "It's very funny, isn't it! An abominable, pragmatical, self-satisfied ass, that's what he is; and are we almost grown-up men to be handed over to be treated just as he pleases? No; I'll resign the service first. Yes, laugh away, my fine fellow! You see if I don't pay you out for this! Oh, go it! But you see if I take any ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the dark Adventurer, but that—how immeasurably ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... greatest rascal of all, who, when escape is impossible, turns traitor, and after deserving the cart and pillory a dozen times for his last and most utter baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the honour of addressing the audience at the play's end in the most smug and self-satisfied tone, and of 'putting himself on you that are my country,' not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair majority who would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... next room are a number of the later and showy painters, such as Carlo Dolci, Lorenzo Lippi, and Francesco Furini, all bold, dashing, self-satisfied hands, in whom (so near the real thing) one can take no interest. Nothing ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the most secret recesses of the heart, not a thought which did not proceed from his. Mute Europe listened to him by its representatives. From time to time he raise an imperious voice, and threw a self-satisfied word to this pompous circle, as a man who throws a copper coin among a crowd of beggars. Then might be distinguished, by the pride which lit up his looks and the joy visible in his countenance, the prince who had received ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... her so unreservedly into his mind and heart, cherishing her ideas and opinions as quite the most vital things in all the world, and sometimes that would help her to smile, and not infrequently it made her long to hurl a test-tube at the self-satisfied head of Mr. Beason. But always, in the end, it caused her to set her whole being with new persistence, more passionate stubbornness, in this determination ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... good deeds with such pride do you scan, And why that self-satisfied smile At the shilling you gave to the poor working man, That lifted you ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... such I presume one is bound to designate him, however little appearance might warrant such an appellation) was a snort, stout, not to say fat personage, with an unmeaning pink and white face, and a smug self-satisfied manner and look, which involuntarily reminded one of a sleek and well-conditioned tom-cat. Old Mr. Coleman rose also, and shaking his hand with great empressement, left the room with him in order to conduct him to the door ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... her, and condemned by the world, was betaking himself to an exile which had not even the dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him no other resource. Had he been of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he might have found in insensibility a sure refuge against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept him so awake to the applauses of mankind rendered him, in a still ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... he, with a self-satisfied smile, "that's true. But talking about yarns, you remember when I was with Milburn's, running to Hamburg? The old gentleman asked me to take a few overmen a trip. They belonged to some mine he was interested in. By the time we got outside, and got the decks cleared up, it was dark, and ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... the true type and pattern of a Government official. A prim, plethoric, middle-aged little man; always dressed very carefully; walking on the tips of his toes; speaking precisely, with a priggish, self-satisfied smirk, and giving his opinion, even on the weather, with the air of a man who was secretly better informed than ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... two people in, in the last few days, asking questions which I don't understand," she told him. "One of them, I am pretty sure, was a detective. He didn't get much change out of me," she added, in a self-satisfied tone, "but there's someone got their knife into us. You remember the trouble down in the Marylebone Road, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... it, and yet not the first step was ever taken to apprehend the guilty wretches who walk the streets today with the brand of murder upon their foreheads, but as safe from harm as the most upright citizen of that community. Memphis would have been just as calm and complacent and self-satisfied over the murder of the six colored men in 1894 as it was over these three colored men in 1892, had it not recognized the fact that to escape the brand of barbarism it had not only to speak its denunciation but to act vigorously ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... is silent. Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland, the self-satisfied sheep-boy delivers a last complacent squint down the length of his penny-whistle, and, with a flourish correspondingly awry, he also marches into silence, hailed by supper. The woods are still. There is heard but the night-jar spinning on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was two months ago. I don't think I am the morally self-satisfied prig I was two months ago.... I'd be easier on anything now, even a cat. But don't think I mean more than I do mean, Duane," she added hastily. "I've missed you a little. I want you to be nice to me.... After all, you're the oldest friend I ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... go to and fro like that funny little crab we saw lately in Aquaria, who adorns his head and shoulders with bits of sea-weed, or any other stuff within his reach, and paddles about his tank self-satisfied and ridiculous. Women must and will trim, as spiders spin webs, and bees make honeycombs. They even trim bathing-dresses: one would think that nothing could redeem them from their hideousness. But they obey a law of their being. The special ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... catch the train to Carpledon in a self-satisfied mind. He was tired, certainly, and had felt ever since the shock of three days back a certain "warning" sensation that hovered over him rather like hot air, suggesting that sudden agonizing pain...but ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... miles away, and high amid the clouds. Perchance I touch the mountain whose blue summit, With the fantastic rock upon its side, Stops the eye's flight from that high chamber-window Where, when a boy, I used to sit and gaze With wondering awe upon the mighty thing, Terribly calm, alone, self-satisfied, The hitherto of my child-thoughts. Beyond, A sea might roar around its base. Beyond, Might be the depths of the unfathomed space, This the earth's bulwark over the abyss. Upon its very point I have watched a star ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... people we have, at present, nothing to do; it is only those who have begun to realize their bondage as such, or who suffer from it, that can take any steps toward freedom. The self-satisfied slaves must stay in prison until they see where they are—and it is curious and sad to see them rejoicing in bondage and miscalling it freedom. It makes one long to see them struck by an emergency, bringing ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... in the impossibility of realizing his ideal was in the comparison he made of his own works with similar ones by contemporary authors. Then he was content; and then only appeared in his letters and diary that good-natured, self-satisfied feeling which arose from the consciousness that he was one of the most fortunate authors who had ever lived. There was nothing cynical in his sense of superiority, but an amiable self-assertion and self-confidence that only made men smile,—as when Lord Palmerston remarked that "he wished he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... his hand—Olivia thought it looked as much like a claw as like a hand. "It's a sky-scraper, but we build sky-scrapers overnight. Time and space used to be the big elements. WE practically disregard them." He followed this with a self-satisfied laugh and an emptying of his champagne glass ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... over him like some fattening and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side. Her small, flat face with its yellowish and unhealthy tinge, its light melancholy ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... errand—for no lady of the precise name of Mrs. Trotter is to be discovered. He consoles himself, however, that he has not been such a fool as to leave the goods without the money, and re-entering his shop with a self-satisfied air, feels sensibly hurt and indignant when his master asks him what has become of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... attendant now returned slowly along the beach, the latter bearing a large salmon-trout, the produce of the morning's sport, together with the angling-rod, while Evan strolled forward, with an easy, self-satisfied, and important gait, towards the spot where Waverley was so agreeably employed at the breakfast-table. After morning greetings had passed on both sides, and Evan, looking at Waverley, had said something in Gaelic to Alice, which made ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... world surrounding her and herself there seemed to be too little in common; she herself seemed secretly bewildered and wondering how she had come there. All the members of Mr. Ratsch's family looked self-satisfied, simple-hearted, healthy creatures; her beautiful, but already careworn, face bore the traces of depression, pride and morbidity. The others, unmistakable plebeians, were unconstrained in their manners, coarse perhaps, but simple; but a painful uneasiness ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... again at the paper. "Beautiful, beautiful!" exclaimed he, with a self-satisfied smile. "My pen has shot nothing less than bomb-shells and grape, and my ink has turned into whole streams of the enemy's blood. And why should I not be bold, it being perfectly safe, since the king must certainly be victorious, and the enemy has no idea of visiting Berlin? Tschernitscheff ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... Lesley was not learned enough to say: it certainly did not exist in London. She looked at the woman who waited on her with keenly observant eyes. Her name was Mary Kingston, and Lesley knew that she was not one of the prosperous, self-satisfied, over-dressed type, so common amongst ladies' maids; for she had been "out of a situation" for some time, and had fallen into dire straits of poverty. It would not have been like Miss Brooke to hire a common-place, conventional ladies' maid; she really preferred a servant "with a history." Lesley ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... love her! I know her better in an hour than you could do in a lifetime;" and Donald looked rather contemptuously on the plain man who was watching him with eyes that might have warned any one more suspicious or less confident and self-satisfied. ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of the excitement of the adventure, had given us an excellent appetite, and even Jack Penny ate away heartily, looking self-satisfied and ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... centuries or so." Meanwhile, is it the faith of an Irving, or the God of a Cromwell, that our subtle-minded author would have us adopt, or would adopt himself? If he scorn the easy, methodical citizen, who plods along the beaten tracks of life, looking occasionally, in his demure, self-satisfied manner, upwards to the heavens, but with no other result than to plod more perseveringly along his very earthy track, it follows not that there is any one order of fanatic spirits with whom he would associate, to whose theology he would yield assent. Verily, no. He demands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... feels neither anger nor sympathy; he neither censures, nor moralizes; for the self-satisfied Middle Ages cannot conceive the possibility of a different world. Brief, quick, he despises aims and methods, his only object is to entertain his auditors. Amusing and witty, he cares ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... struck four; M. Verduret, who was punctuality itself, appeared. He was more red-faced and self-satisfied, if possible, than ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... for Gabriel Rossetti. He was twenty-two, gifted, handsome, intellectual, the adored pet and pride of his mother and two sisters, and also the hero of the little art group to which he belonged. I am not sure but that the lavish love his friends had for him made him a bit smug and self-satisfied, for we hear of Ruskin saying, "Thank God he is young," which remark means all that you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of the Eighteenth Century witnessed a weakening of both sides through compromise. The schools and colleges were pedantic, complacent, smug and self-satisfied; by giving in a few points they had absorbed the radicals, and the political protesters had been bought off with snug places in the excise. Pretended knowledge passed for wisdom, dignity paraded as worth, affectation and hypocrisy patronized virtue. And Coleridge appears upon ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... ground his teeth. Lohengrin seemed to him a blatant lie. He loathed the huxtering chivalry, the hypocritical mummery, the hero without fear and without a heart, the incarnation of cold and selfish virtue admiring itself and most patently self-satisfied. He knew it too well, he had seen it in reality, the type of German Pharisee, foppish, impeccable, and hard, bowing down before its own image, the divinity to which it has no scruple about sacrificing others. The Flying Dutchman overwhelmed him with its massive sentimentality and its gloomy ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Laura, are so very, very pleasant! How delighted you would be to see her married to the stout man in the red cravat, who gave her bouquets, and strolled with her on the deck of the steamer upon the St. Lawrence! What a jaunty, self-satisfied air he wore; and with what considerate forbearance he treated you—calling you once or twice Master Clarence! It never occurred to you before, how much you must be indebted to ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... to like you a little. I perfectly loathed you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome elderly ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... which God looks in a Christian's life is humility. Every act and word of our Saviour's earthly life teaches us to be humble. Let the haughty, the proud, the self-satisfied man, open his Gospel, and he will find a reproof to his pride on every page. Let him bend his head, and bow his stiff knee before the Almighty God, cradled in a manger, fasting in the desert, homeless, friendless, silent before His foes, stripped, mocked and ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... of the dock and the court and the Town Hall amidst a dead silence—which was felt and noticed by everybody but himself. At that moment he was too elated, too self-satisfied to notice anything. He held his head very high as he went out by the crowded doorway, and through the crowd which had gathered on the stairs; he might have been some general returning to be publicly feted as he emerged upon the broad steps under the Town Hall portico and threw a triumphant ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... self-satisfied life came, one morning, a great surprise in the shape of a beautiful young woman, who entered his office in Spanish Town, and who stated to him that she was the daughter of his only sister, and that she had come to live with ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... extravagances, serving merely to relieve and set off the main stream of debate, they were often enough, it may be guessed, connected with the theme in hand by links not the less apt that they might be too subtle to catch their bedazzled and self-satisfied optics. There might be keener knowledge of human nature than was "dreamt of in their philosophy"—which passed with them for commonplace, only because it was clothed in plain familiar household words, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... jealousy was one of his infirmities; thus by never arousing his evil passions, their very existence was forgotten, and the violent, capricious Ranger would have been hardly recognized (except by his very intimates), as the self-satisfied, and somewhat important manager ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... or gnats such as Murphy, and others, easily stung him. He was lampooned as "The Sick Monkey" on his return to the stage after having taken a much needed rest. But discretion and audacity seemed to go hand-in-hand, and the self-satisfied satirizer generally over-shoots the mark. Garrick was ever ready with a reply to his assailants; when Dr. Hill attacked his pronunciation, saying that he pronounced his "i's" as if ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... and that he could not bear it any longer. Either he must act at once or fall on the ground, and scream and bang his head upon the floor. He pictured Vlassitch and Zina, both of them progressive and self-satisfied, kissing each other somewhere under a maple tree, and all the anger and bitterness that had been accumulating in him for the last ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... assuming the self-satisfied manner of a jailer; "it would not be proper for me to ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... passed (a) (3) in a self-satisfied manner through twenty years of office, letting things take their own course; to have (b) sailed with consummate sagacity, never against the tide of popular (c) judgement; to have left on record as the sole title to distinction among English ministers a peculiar art of (d) sporting with ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott |
