"Complacency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... specimen of the explanation of a prophecy given by Lilly, and related by him with much complacency, will be sufficient to show the sort of trash by which he imposed upon the million. "In the year 1588," says he, "there was a prophecy printed in Greek characters, exactly deciphering the long troubles ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... steered a sudden course among dangerous rocks and rapids and come safe through, puts in the breast of the helmsman a calm content with himself, for which no man will blame him. What in this world is there so lifts one into complacency as the doing of a bold and cool-headed thing? Let the helmsman sleep sound when he has got to land! But if his content overtake him still on the water, so that he grows blind to the treacherous currents that eddy where all looks placid to the ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... right and proper, Miss Devon; and I thank her for her care of my interests." And Mrs. King bowed her acknowledgment of the service with a perfect castanet accompaniment, whereat Miss Cotton bridled with malicious complacency. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... complacency of the bashaw, who, having by this last demand used up all the grocer's cash, finished by taking possession of his cash-box ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... business friends, eloped with the daughter of one of his benefactors and disappeared from the earth, apparently. 'Murder will out' A few years after the forger returned to the city, and established himself under an assumed name in the making of shoes, forgetting, however, to maintain complacency, and thinking that no one would recognise him. In a passion at what he considered the carelessness of one of his workmen regarding the time some work should have been delivered, he told the man he should not ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... short time afterwards, Phrynichus made this event the subject of a tragedy which he exhibited on the stage at Athens; and after he had been for a short time listened to with complacency, when amid all its fine language the tragedy became more and more distressing, it was condemned by the indignation of the people, who thought that it was insulting to produce this as the subject of a dramatic poem, and that it had been prompted not by a wish to console, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... With his customary self-complacency and patronising air James told the assembled Commons that he had brought them two gifts, the one peace abroad,(26) and the other the union of England with Scotland under the title of Great Britain,(27) and he expressed no little surprise and indignation when he found that neither one ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... scrupulous friend Nightingale, requires to be cast in a different mould. His whole character should have been strung to a higher pitch to make us feel that such degradation would not merely have required punishment to restore his self-complacency, but have left a craving for some ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of the motley," continued the other, not without complacency, observing the effect of his announcement on ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... considered when the impression of novelty has worn off. I think we may safely appeal to all critics who occupy themselves much with conjectural criticism, and ask them if TIME does not frequently impair the complacency with which they regard their efforts ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... were glad of it. Their mother was one of those shrunken, faded patterns of woman who have never done anything to keep smooth the cheek and dignify the brow. The father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness, and entire self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not forbear ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant—an occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that there should be so huge a terrestrial ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... sat down, inhaling them and looking at them; and a dreamy, tender complacency crept over his heart, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of the most patriotic and generous feeling. Numerous instances are also related of his kindness to individuals, and of his private benefactions. The children of his tenants, and neighbours were objects of his generosity and complacency. And those who are unjustly oppressed or defrauded, were sure to find in him, an able advocate. The widow of an American officer, of French parentage, who was left destitute at the death of her gallant husband, had a claim for patrimonial estates in France. ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... take it for granted (1) that it was worth doing, and (2) that whatever be worth doing is worth doing well, then Mr. Leonard has reason for his complacency. "It was never my intention," he says, "to gather together a complete collection of even British poems about dogs."—When will that come, I wonder?—"I have sought to secure a representative rather than an exhaustive anthology." His selections from a mass of poetry ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... suspends the exercise of the senses, and imparts to them again an artificial acuteness; it has its follies and its wisdom; and the most perverse thing of all is that it fills its votaries with a complacency more full and complete even than that which reason ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... talked like this, until to-day. Oh, he's told me a little, from time to time. But to- day, to-day, he just poured out his heart to me—ME!—and there are so many who need just that message to stir them from their smug complacency—men who could fight, and win: men who WOULD fight, and win, if only they could see and hear and know, as I saw and heard and knew this afternoon. And there it was, wasted, WASTED, ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... fishing-rod and travelling-trunk, with a letter to Meg, dated a week previously, desiring her to prepare to receive an old acquaintance. This annunciation, though something of the latest, Meg received with great complacency, observing it was a civil attention in Maister Tirl; and that John Hislop, though he was not just sae fast, was far surer than ony post of them a', or express either. She also observed with satisfaction, that ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... literary fashion. I should welcome a good assault upon Shakespeare which was not prompted by a love of singularity; and there are half-a-dozen popular idols—I have not the courage to name them—a genuine attack upon whom I could witness with entire equanimity, not to say some complacency. If Johnson's blunder in this case implied sheer stupidity, one can only say that honest stupidity is a much better thing than clever insincerity or fluent repetition of second-hand dogmas. But, in fact, this dislike of 'Lycidas,' and a good many ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... The complacency with which we are able to state without fear of contradiction that the body of intelligent and thoughtful women do want suffrage must not obscure our perception of the equal truth of what we have just stated above. To accept this verity and turn our energies ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... complacency point to the fact that these rates do not cover the forwarding of passengers' baggage and that this service must be paid for separately. These charges, however, are very moderate, being on 120 pounds of baggage 8-1/3 cents a distance of 34 miles or less, ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... fantastical disposition. I myself remember a young lady that was very warmly solicited by a couple of importunate rivals, who, for several months together, did all they could to recommend themselves, by complacency of behaviour and agreeableness of conversation. At length, when the competition was doubtful, and the lady undetermined in her choice, one of the young lovers very luckily bethought himself of adding a supernumerary lace to his liveries, ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... an air of virtuous complacency, "I believe you are right. I can't deny it, though it may help your side ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... his time that Philistinism met its match in Oscar Wilde, and for the first time in its history felt its self-complacency shaken. Up to that time it had been very proud of itself. With the loss of that pride it blundered, and it remained for du Maurier to show that the height of Philistinism in a Philistine is to pretend not to ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... "Sunday" was the last straw for Jones, sweeping away breakfast, bank and everything; coming on top of the events of the last twenty-four hours, it brought his mental complacency to ruin, ruin from which shot blazing ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... disgraced their associates by excesses which, under the stricter discipline of the Parliamentary armies, were never tolerated. We will select a more favourable specimen. Thinking as we do that the cause of the King was the cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain from looking with complacency on the character of the honest old Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in comparing them with the instruments which the despots of other countries are compelled to employ, with the mutes who throng their ante-chambers, and the Janissaries who mount guard at their ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to them when in need of such solace as only money can bring. The time arrived when I applied in vain; the money had disappeared. Though I had no reason to suspect COX AND CO. of being dishonest I noticed a tone of assuredness and self-complacency in their letters strangely similar to that in my own, and I knew that I was being dishonest, so I demanded to see my pass-book. It was a horrid sight, and it gave me seriously to think. How came it that the side of the book ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... top with a flourish. Under it was a single griddle. Mlle. Fouchette regarded the domestic machine with great complacency, her blonde head prettily cocked on ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... you may be, during this period clear and calm reflection has been vouchsafed you as never before. What really plunged us into confusion regarding our position, into thoughtlessness, into a blind way of letting things go, was our sweet complacency with ourselves and our mode of existence. Things had thus gone on hitherto, and so they continued and would continue to go. If any one challenged us to reflect, we triumphantly showed him, instead of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... have to play now that I'm here," he said, with the most exasperating complacency. "My daughter plays some, and she is as crazy about it as the rest of them. I don't see where the fascination comes in. I called the other day on a man who was once in the Cabinet. He is rich and famous, and can have anything or do anything he likes, but he spends most of his time playing ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... of others as new and wondrous discoveries of his own genius and profound meditation; and all with such a simplicity and complacency of self-satisfied conviction, that you never dream or impugning the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... need it as a corrective of the tendency to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us to overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely, less hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... and injustice. This Mr. B. seems, from the beginning, to have considered his countrymen as a set of cheating, lying, swindling rascals; and a mutual contempt has existed between them. We wish all our officers and agents would bear in mind this fact, that complacency begets complacency; ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... guard against complacency. We must not underrate the enemy. He is powerful and cunning—and cruel and ruthless. He will stop at nothing that gives him a chance to kill and to destroy. He has trained his people to believe that their highest perfection is achieved by waging war. For ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... our hero passed as Burton and on the ball-field as Chris, and since his existence alternated 'twixt these two worlds, he was Christopher Mark Antony Burton only at breakfast and at bed-time—intervals so brief that they were endured with cheerfulness and complacency. ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... the huckster's, he found him in the backroom, or parlor, to which we have before alluded. The old man's manner was, he thought, considerably changed for the better. He received him with more complacency, and seemed as if he felt something like regret for the harshness of his manner toward him during ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... which are the subjects of religious controversy. The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency. "Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being meddled with. It means, of course, self-trust,—that is, a belief in the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that we ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Miss Galindo's misdemeanour in having taken Miss Bessy to live with her, faded into a mistake, a mere error of judgment, in comparison with Captain James's intimacy at Yeast House, as the Brookes called their ugly square-built farm. My lady talked herself quite into complacency with Miss Galindo, and even Miss Bessy was named by her, the first time I had ever been aware that my lady recognized her existence; but—I recollect it was a long rainy afternoon, and I sat with her ladyship, and we had time and opportunity for a ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... that your lordship's countenance (I am a very free speaker) has that benignity in it, that complacency, which I have had the pleasure to see ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... question, this lesser accusation might suffice. But there are the Lost Illusions, the Bachelor's Household, and Cousin Bette, not to mention other novels, in which the scenes of vice are dwelt upon with visible complacency and a glamour is created and thrown over them by the writer's imagination, in such a way that the effect is nauseous in proportion as it is pleasurable. The artistic representation of vice and crime is justifiable only in so far as the mind contemplating ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross complacency. At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... When I saw them, I tried for my life not to laugh, and biting my lips very hard, quite succeeded, until the cock opened up a pair of sleepy eyes, covered with comb and very sad inversions, and glancing with complacency at his wife (who stood beneath him, even more turned inside out), capered with his twiggy legs, and gave a long, sad crow. Mrs. Hockin looked ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... had given indications of resistance, they would have been obliged to submit to prompt repression, but we see no sign of this. The bulk of the people—clerical as well as lay—accepted the deposition with complacency, and the nobles hastened to offer their adherence to that which afterwards became the official confession of faith of the Lord King.* The lord of Thebes itself, a certain Ramses, bowed his head to the new cult, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... would find herself on intimate terms at Court before the fortnight was concluded; and oh! the joy of returning home and speaking in casual tones about Princes of the Blood, Dukes and Marquises, and Cabinet Ministers, for, the edification of village hearers! Her complacency vented itself in a long postscript to the letter already written to her mother, a postscript of such characteristic nature as delighted that appreciative lady, and which was read aloud with much unction to her husband, and a friend of the family who ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... mighty Empire. Curious are the lives these men, and many like them, lead, cut off as it were from the bustling, throbbing world. A handful of white men, surrounded by thousands of blacks, with calm complacency they proceed, first to impress on the natives the importance, the might, and the justice, of the great Empire which they represent in their various capacities; then to establish beyond question their own dignity and wisdom; and finally to make themselves ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... rigorous manner of speaking; I have sought your favour by all possible means.' 'True it is, madam,' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at divers controversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offended at me.' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... recompensed by the enthusiasm of fraternal love with which his Ally, the oppressed people whom he was going to aid in rescuing themselves, would receive him; and that this, and the virtues which he would witness in them, would furnish his heart with never-failing and far nobler objects of complacency and admiration. The discipline of the army was well known; and as a machine, or a vital organized body, the Nation was assured that it could not but be formidable; but thus to the standing excellence of mechanic or organic power seemed to be superadded, at this time, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... hard eyes of Dinsmore took in the smug complacency of the handsome young cad. He knew that this particular brand of fool would go its own way, but he wasted a ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... a case like this. Indeed, I am not sure you ought not to go further and weigh the whole character and quality and upbringing of the man. You must admit that the monumental complacency with which he trotted out his ingenious little Constitution for India showed a strange want of imagination and the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... in these days, had recovered her complacency. The letter she wrote from Symon's Yat had reached Vanrenen from Paris, and its hearty disapproval of Fitzroy helped to re-establish his good opinion of her. She heard constantly, too, from Marigny ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... knows of. Now he is chiefly known as poet; but when I went to New York-people thought most about him as editor of the "Evening Post," and that with little enough complacency in the circles where I moved. How many a fight I had for him with my Whig friends! For he was my parishioner, and it was known that we were much together. The "Evening Post" was a thorn in their sides, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... weeks the time of departure was kept a few days ahead and regularly postponed. First, happened the failure of a contractor; next, the non-arrival of a ship; next, the purchase of supplies; and so on through a long list of hindrances. In the beginning I was vexed, but soon learned complacency and gave myself no uneasiness. Patience is an admirable quality in mankind, and can be very well practiced when, one is waiting for a ship ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... the whole British Fair to have outshone my southern Gawry: For if, to a majestic Form and extensive Capacity, I had been qualified to have copied that natural Sweetness of Disposition, that maternal Tenderness, that Cheerfulness, that Complacency, Condescension, Affability, and unaffected Benevolence, which so apparently distinguish the Countess of Northumberland; I had exhibited in my Youwarkee a Standard ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... was simple enough now. All his fractiousness, restlessness, and innumerable wants were easy to put up with; she loved the child. And he, who (except from his father) had never known any love before, took it with a wondering complacency, half funny, half pathetic. Sometimes he would say, looking at her wistfully, "Oh, it's so nice to be ill!" And once, the first time she untied his right arm, and allowed it to move freely, he slipped it around her neck, whispering, "You are very good to me, mother." ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... employ the powers of luminous reason in contemplating eternal nothing with sweet complacency. This is "exactly" as it should be! Varying from this the proposition would need to be "pruned!" Dear brother, does reason countenance all this absurdity? If it be a pleasure to contemplate non-existence does it not involve ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... on his shoulder, and the town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe without knowing why. The flourishing towns became villages; churches were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German fanaticism. The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy's towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce as only fit ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to take money won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice little church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino. What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... witness their repeated failure—herself unconscious that they did fail; vainly fancying that each shaft launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly pluming herself on success, when her pride and self-complacency repelled further and further what she wished to allure—to witness this, was to be at once under ceaseless excitation ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... General felt the tremendous fatigues of the day; there was a wild, swimming, whirling sensation in his head that forced him to let his eyelids sink down; yet, just there, in the midst of his painful bewilderment, he realized with ecstatic complacency that the most martial-looking man in Louisiana was standing in his spurs with the hand of Louisiana's queenliest woman laid tenderly on ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... hideous images followed me without intermission. I lost my sleep; it was impossible for me to do anything; my brush fell from my hand; and, horrible to confess, I found myself sometimes gazing at the crossbeam with a sort of complacency. At last I could endure it no longer, and one evening I descended the ladder and hid myself behind the door of Fledermausse, hoping ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... I have come to Nannie to be soothed. All the way upstairs I have been saying to myself, "Fret not thyself, because of him who prospereth in his way." But it is hard to see his self-complacency.' ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... The general complacency with the progress in knowledge we have made and are making is ridiculously unjustifiable. Enormous things were no doubt done in the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but all that was done was out of all proportion petty in comparison with what ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... like a well-balanced kite; it has for its tail a whimsy. Haggerty, on a certain day, received twenty-five hundred dollars from the Hindu prince and five hundred more from the hotel management. The detective bore up under the strain with stoic complacency. "The Blind Madonna of the Pagan—Chance" always had her ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... how to speak of this exercise of the mind. It is better felt than described. It is a calm and holy reconciliation with God and his government; a settled feeling of complacency towards everything but sin. It begets a serene and peaceful temper and disposition of the heart. But this gracious work of the Holy Spirit does not stop with these exercises of the mind. However we may seem to feel, in our moments of retirement ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... is it that fat, plethoric, meat-eating children, their faces looking as though the blood was just ready to ooze out, are with the greatest complacency exhibited by their parents as patterns of health! But let it ever be remembered, that the condition of the system popularly called rude or full health, and which is the result of high feeding, is too often closely bordering on a state ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... listened to these several outpourings of spirit with much complacency, "I am a man of peace and amity, according to my conscience; but if others are men of wrath and battle, according to theirs, I will not take it upon me to censure them,—nay, not even if they should feel themselves ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future life is reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source of complacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... health, in her education, in her wedded life, in her children. She saw a great Empire grow through troubled times in liberty and power and greatness; yet this prosperity brought with it no shadow of complacency, because the Queen felt with an increasing depth the anxieties and responsibilities inseparable from her great position. Her happiness, instead of making her self-absorbed, only quickened her beneficence and her womanly desire that her subjects should be enabled to enjoy a similar happiness ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... consider that for generations to come there will be a haven of rest provided for so many old people past their work. The soul of King James's confectioner—good Balthazar Sanchez—must, we feel sure, still contemplate his cottages at Tottenham with complacency; one hopes His Majesty was not overcharged in the matter of pasties and comfits in order to find the endowment for those cottages. Even the dole of a few loaves every Sunday to as many aged poor has its attraction, though necessarily ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... so far as Sparta alone was concerned, the Athenian felt little repugnance to any revolution or any peril confined to a state whose councils it had been the object of his life to baffle, and whose power it was the manifest interest of his native city to impair. He might have looked with complacency on the intrigues which the regent was carrying on against the Spartan government, and which threatened to shake that Doric constitution to its centre. But nothing, either in the witness of history or in the character ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency and half-disdain. ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... shock some readers, but I am sure it ought not to do so, considering the motives on which I say it. No man, I suppose, employs much of his time on the phenomena of his own body without some regard for it; whereas the reader sees that, so far from looking upon mine with any complacency or regard, I hate it, and make it the object of my bitter ridicule and contempt; and I should not be displeased to know that the last indignities which the law inflicts upon the bodies of the worst malefactors might hereafter fall upon ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... The philosophy of complacency, at least, will be at an end, and the world will face with new earnestness the problem of life. This generation will be tired, perhaps exhausted, by the titanic struggle; but youth comes on, fresh and eager, with exhaustless vital energy, and the generations to come will take ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... had passed from his previous state of haughty complacency to one of violent haste. Already, on August 23, thus long before the sixty days had expired, he demanded the Elector to deliver up this 'child of the devil,' who boasted of his protection, to the legate, to bring away ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... it would be an affair to occupy two or three hours, and he suddenly resolved to go down the cliff and interview his mother-in-law. It would please Denasia, and he was himself in that reckless mood of self-complacency which ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... for the suffrage we shall put an end to an otherwise endless disputation. I am quite sure that as long as her votes are kept separate from the men's votes, and are not counted, no possible harm can come from a little complacency in the face of ... Personally I have no objection to divorce. If a man marries a woman under the impression that she is a good cook, and after the waning of the honeymoon finds that she does not know the difference between sponge-cake and a plain common garden sponge, why should he be forced ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... open. In the hall I had an examination to undergo; the porter, however, permitted me to be announced, and I had the honor to be called into the park, where Mr. John was walking with a select party. I recognized the man at once by the lustre of his corpulent self-complacency. He received me very well—as a rich man receives a poor devil—even turned toward me, without turning from the rest of the company, and took the offered letter from my hand. "So, so, from my brother! I have heard nothing from him for a long time. But he is well? There," continued he, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... beauty. Finding herself thus ensnared, as she was a woman of strong mind, instead of indulging in unavailing complaint, she assumed a satisfied air; and as the only way to preserve her honour, received the addresses of the treacherous master with pretended complacency, and consented to receive him as a husband at the first port at which the ship might touch. With these assurances he was contented, and behaved to her with honourable deference, and affectionate respect. At length the vessel anchored near a city, to which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Upon arriving, it was discovered that some of the Jersey Brigade had taken possession of our log snuggeries, and that their officers had established their heels upon the mantels in our officers' quarters, and were smoking the pipes of comfort and complacency, as though they had not a trouble in the world, and never expected to have. But they soon found that possession is not nine points of military law, by any means. An order from Division Headquarters soon sent them profanely packing,—and ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... gratification; contentment, complacency, content, comfort; reparation, indemnification, requital, reimbursement, recompense; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... cheerfully for regiments of soldiers. The pictures which we are gradually getting from memoirs and letters are almost too grotesque for belief, and there is some little excuse for the hearty optimists who look back with complacency on the past, and thank their stars that they have escaped from the domain of evil. For my own part, when I see the mode of life now generally followed by most of our European aristocracies, I am quite ready to be grateful for a beneficent change, and I have again and again made light of the wailings ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... could, Ernest. Of course I don't know very much—not judged by a standard like yours or our dear Harry's. Harry used to say all a woman could ever know was to find out how ignorant she was. Dear fellow! he was so very learned himself he couldn't understand the complacency of little perky, half-educated schoolmistresses. But still, I know quite as much, I think, in my little way, as a great many girls who get good places in London as governesses. I can speak French fairly well, you know, and read German ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... loveliness of the gem. That a Palais Royal deception! Incredible! My fingers twitched, my breath came short and fierce with the lust of possession. She must have seen the covetous glare in my eyes. A look of gratified spiteful complacency overspread her features, as she swept on ahead and descended the stairs before me. I followed her to the drawing-room door. She stopped suddenly, and murmuring something unintelligible ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... when I knew he was pondering upon the baleful curse that had cast its withering blight upon all around, until the manhood and humanity were crushed out of the people, and outrages such as the above were looked upon with complacency, and the perpetrators treated as respected and worthy citizens,—and that he was realizing the great truth, that, however man might endeavor to guide this war to the advantage of a favorite idea or sagacious policy, the Almighty was directing it surely and steadily for the purification ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Thursday, the 15th of February, 1827, as I sat with a volume of the Tor Hill in my hand, in the back drawing-room of my lodging in Conduit-street. It was about ten o'clock in the afternoon. My dinner was just removed. It had left me with that gay complacency of disposition, and irrepressible propensity of elocution, which result from a satisfied appetite, and an undisturbed digestion. My sense of contentment became more vigorous and confirmed, as I cast my eye around my apartment, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... poured forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The change came gradually, but ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Collet Pardue," said Mrs Tabitha, with calm complacency; "and that's a thing a woman shouldn't do who calls herself ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... a certain artifice with her eyes, and the skill of beauty, she will arm herself with her real charms, and strike you with admiration instead of desire. It is certain that if you were to behold the whole woman, there is that dignity in her aspect, that composure in her motion, that complacency in her manner, that if her form makes you hope, her merit makes you fear. But then again she is such a desperate scholar, that no country gentleman can approach her without being a jest. As I was going to tell you, when I came to her house I was admitted to her presence with ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... tassel, which is not without its accompanying satisfaction. One can walk the streets of any of the university towns in his academic robes without being jeered at, as I am afraid he would be in some of our own thoroughfares. There is a noticeable complacency in the members of our Phi Beta Kappa society when they get the pink and blue ribbons in their buttonholes, on the day of annual meeting. How much more when the scholar is wrapped in those flowing folds, with their ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... appropriated to the French Consul,—the representative of the King of that nation,—and the protection which it has from time immemorial accorded to the Christians of the Latin rite in Syria. All French writers and travellers speak of this protection with delightful complacency. Consult the French books of travel on the subject, and any Frenchman whom you may meet: he says, "La France, Monsieur, de tous les temps protege les Chretiens d'Orient;" and the little fellow looks round the church with a sweep of the arm, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... important subject in any other than terms of contemptuous ridicule and scornful disfavor, is likely to excite against us the fury of bigotry and the folly of prejudice. A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of women. It is, in their estimation, to be guilty of evil thoughts, to think that woman is entitled to equal ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... having left in him but one residual impression. They didn't like les situations nettes—that was all he was very sure of. They wouldn't have them at any price; it had been their national genius and their national success to avoid them at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their wonderful spirit of compromise—the very influence of which actually so hung about him here, from moment to moment, that the earth and the air, the light and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... wherein consists the great charm of dramatic poetry. Action is the true enjoyment of life, nay, life itself. Mere passive enjoyments may lull us into a state of listless complacency, but even then, if possessed of the least internal activity, we cannot avoid being soon wearied. The great bulk of mankind merely from their situation in life, or from their incapacity for extraordinary exertions, are confined ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... a look of great complacency and some wonder, at the child; and packed forthwith into Daisy's basket the half of a cold chicken and a broken peach-pie. A bottle of milk Daisy particularly desired, and a little butter; and she set off at last, happier than ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... this went through the Lieutenant-Governor's mind during the progress of the dinner. He sat at Mrs. Rathbawne's right, than which nothing in the world could have been more cheerless, unless it was sitting at Mrs. Rathbawne's left. But the good lady's habitual complacency was plainly in abeyance, her customary volubility replaced by a fidgety reserve. The dinner, as a social achievement, was a distinct failure, save in so far as Mrs. Wynyard and Colonel Broadcastle were concerned. Several months before, Mrs. Wynyard had frankly announced that she had designs ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... should look upon the gentleman with no clothing except a scanty forelock, and with no personal property save his scythe and hour-glass, as my greatest enemy,—and I should behold the perpetual efforts made to kill him with perfect complacency. This, I know, is not regarded as a strictly moral act; for this murderer of murderers is very much caressed by those who, in the name of Moses, would send a poor devil to his hempen destiny for striking an unlucky ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Anne's plans could not be settled until Roy had spoken. He would soon—there was no doubt of that. And there was no doubt that Anne would say "yes" when he said "Will you please?" Anne herself regarded the state of affairs with a seldom-ruffled complacency. She was deeply in love with Roy. True, it was not just what she had imagined love to be. But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of it? It was the old diamond disillusion of childhood repeated—the same ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pause in this speech; and surveyed himself in a looking-glass with much complacency, whilst he pronounced the word fashion. He, indeed, approved so much of his wife's taste and discernment, in preferring him to Mr. Pimlico, that he could not at this moment help inclining to follow her judgment respecting ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Coropuna, nor could my companions. No sense of satisfaction in having attained a difficult objective cheered us up. We all felt greatly depressed and said little, although Gamarra asked for his bonus and regarded the gold coins with grim complacency. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... in making Niagara a background whereon to display one's marvellous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... exercising those affections of gratitude, complacency, and love toward the objects of their worship which the living God supremely requires, they regarded their deities with horrific dread, and worshipped only with ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... friendly to the political dogmas she cherished, and to the interests and projects of the Southern States. The character and principles of Mr. Adams were not adapted to become subservient to her views, and she saw with little complacency his elevation to the office of Secretary of State, which was in popular opinion a proximate step to the President's chair. Yet it could not be doubted that his appointment had the assent, if not the approbation, of Jefferson and Madison, without whose concurrence ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... arrived. Her ladyship pencilled on the back of the note, 'Pray call the dear babe Magnolia,' and forthwith forgot all about it. But Madam Macnamara was charmed, and the autograph remained afterwards for two generations among the archives of the family; and, with great smiles and much complacency, she told Lord Carrick-o'-Gunniol all about it, just outside the grand jury-room, where she met him during the assize week; and, being a man of a weak and considerate nature, rather kind, and very courteous—although his smile was very near exploding into a laugh, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... "drawn") by means of a T-square and the ruling pen; and if architectural drawing has not quite kept pace with that for general illustration since, a backward glance over the professional magazines encourages a feeling of comparative complacency. That so high a standard or so artistic a character is not observable in architectural as in general illustration is, I think, not difficult to explain. Very few of the clever architectural draughtsmen are illustrators by profession. ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... no better, for all that, and was quite as ugly in the eyes of the wise woman, who could not only see but read her face. What is there to choose between a face distorted to hideousness by anger, and one distorted to silliness by self-complacency? True, there is more hope of helping the angry child out of her form of selfishness than the conceited child out of hers; but on the other hand, the conceited child was not so terrible or dangerous as the wrathful one. The conceited one, however, was sometimes very angry, and then her ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... of religion to-day is that men and women are going to the churches, singing themselves into ecstatic complacency and imaginary harmony with their God while their greed is crushing the hearts of the helpless and they are blinding themselves to the world's gloom and pain that unhindered they ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... bitterly contrasting his lost secretary's performances, in every particular, with those of his daughter. The child had disappeared, and a message from the station was all that remained of her. Well, who could wonder? Mrs. Gaddesden reflected, with some complacency, that even she had spoken her mind to her father that night, conveniently forgetting some annoying retorts of his about herself, and the custom she had developed of sitting for hours over the fire pretending to knit, but really doing nothing. After her enormous ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and hate the sex because, I suspect, you know very little about them," Mr. Pen continued, with an air of considerable self-complacency. "If you dislike the women in the country for being too slow, surely the London women ought to be fast enough for you. The pace of London life is enormous: how do people last at it, I wonder—male and female? ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ran, I then knew nothing, and of course they gave me no concern. Like all inexperienced persons, I supposed myself too strong in virtue to be in any danger of contamination; and this portion of the adventure was regarded with the self-complacency with which the untried are apt to regard their own powers of endurance. I ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... to enlarge the orbit, and will in reality do so; in other parts the effect will be the reverse of this. In a word, by the introduction of a third attractive body, the greatest complication will succeed to a simple regular movement upon which the mind reposed with complacency. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... over him. He fumbled nervously as he dressed himself, in a state almost of childishness. He disliked the Scotch accent in Bertie's speech, and the slight response it found on Isabel's tongue. He disliked the slight purr of complacency in the Scottish speech. He disliked intensely the glib way in which Isabel spoke of their happiness and nearness. It made him recoil. He was fretful and beside himself like a child, he had almost a childish nostalgia to be included in the life circle. And at the same time he was ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... to do when we look with indifference or complacency upon the present phase of unrestricted competition in industrial work amongst women. So long as we refuse to insist, as a nation, that along with the growth of national wealth there shall be secured those ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... we consider ourselves young ladies at that age," continued Fanny, surveying, with complacency, the pile of hair on the top of her head, with a fringe of fuzz round her forehead, and a wavy lock streaming down her back; likewise, her scarlet-and-black suit, with its big sash, little pannier, bright buttons, points, rosettes, and, heaven knows what. There was a ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... never cease, to be sure; but they are not to be had wholesale, or to order. Mr. Owen, who is another of these proprietors and patentees of reform, has lately got an American savage with him, whom he carries about in great triumph and complacency, as an antithesis to his New View of Society, and as winding up his reasoning to what it mainly wanted, an epigrammatic point. Does the benevolent visionary of the Lanark cotton-mills really think this natural man ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... on much as before. An abiding faith in the Allies was the foundation stone of its complacency. The great six-months battle of the Somme, with its million casualties, was resulting favorably. On the east the Russians had made some gains. There were wagers that the Germans would be done ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
