"Smug" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time, he had a feeling that, since he alone knew all the circumstances of his case, he alone was entitled to blame or to excuse himself. The glib judgments that moralists would pass upon his conduct could be nothing but the imbecilities of smug and pharisaic fools—of those not under this drugging spell—of such as had not blood enough, perhaps, ever ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... while you got a razor to cut yer throat".... Ah, well, common sense would reach even the Army some day, and the soldier be treated and disciplined as a man and a citizen—and perhaps, when it did, and the soldier gave a better description of his life, the other citizen, the smug knave who despises him while he shelters behind him, will become less averse from having his own round shoulders straightened, his back flattened and his muscles developed as he takes his part in the first fundamental elementary ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... after town is too awful to witness. Shame on the British Government to make our Colony the scene of this bloody struggle, and leave the handful of soldiers sent out all unsupported, unprepared—unprepared as usual—all smug and self-confident in the little overcrowded, over-comfortable island, and forgetful of the horrors to which unfortunate colonists ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... kind must have happened. I suspect the custom-house officers that the authorities have insisted on keeping aboard us all the time that we have been in harbour; but of course I have not said a word to them about it. I have, however, watched them continually, and by their smug looks of satisfaction I am inclined to believe that they know something about it. And ever since then I have been on the prowl everywhere to see if I could find any trace of the ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... me down with a marlin-spike from the main-royal. An' now as you 'ave your figger'ead in trim, wot I want to know is, wot's it to you? That's wot I want to know—wot's it to you? Gawd blime me! do it 'urt you? Ain't it smug enough for the likes o' you? That's wot ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... Squat, stout, heavy jowled—with a neck that pushed over the back of his collar—a follower of the ring, smug, assertive, confident. A prophet? I was ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... laws I would complain of," she said. "It is your individuals. Look at him—a poor, shivering, starved creature, watching a constant stream of well-fed, well-clothed, smug men of business, passing always within a few feet of him. Why does he not help himself to ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thing's so mad that if I wait till then I'll never want to do it. And you've got to come, so that I'll have some one to quarrel with.... I hate the smugness of London, especially the smugness of the anti-smug anti-bourgeois radicals, so that I have the finest ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... everything in preparation for their feast, and, to protect their dainties from flies, had put sheets of tissue paper over the table. Mary lifted these deftly, but as she removed them her smug satisfaction changed to a howl of dismay. Instead of the tempting dainties which they had placed there with their own hands stood a circle ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Fenwick asked himself. Did he believe what he had seen or didn't he? He had been smug in front of Baker after the first demonstration, but now he wondered how much he had been covered by the same brush that ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the greatest ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two poems she refers definitely to Africa as her home, but in each instance there seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug contentment at her own escape therefrom. In the poem, "On Being Brought from ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... places, and not rising till they were ready to leave the car. It was a horrible scene, and incredible,—that well-dressed woman sitting on the floor, and those two well-dressed men keeping their places; it was as much out of keeping with our smug respectabilities as a hanging, and was a spectacle so paralyzing that public opinion took no action concerning it. A shabby person, standing upon the platform outside, swore about it, between expectorations: even the conductor's heart was touched; and he said ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... word which can apply to none other American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, 'tis a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... reasonable thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure; cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern. In this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of truth; a faith that lost and regained itself in life; it was dynamic in its operation; for, as Lessing said, the searching after truth, and not its ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... gentlemen to rally round it, had been a measure agreed in countless meetings, and applauded over thousands of bumpers. I have a pretty good memory, and could mention the name of many a gentleman, now a smug officer of the United States Government, whom I have heard hiccup out a prayer that he might be allowed to perish under the folds of his country's flag; or roar a challenge to the bloody traitors absent with the rebel army. But let bygones ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... guest. "The big one might shut off some of you from my devouring eyes." He was mixing ingredients in a chafing-dish as he spoke, and he wore the trying air of smug complacency that invariably accompanies ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... of the heart," at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold, formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for the Wesleys ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... slightly censorious reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddling through," which look rather ghastly in ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... greatly we have been disillusioned in all this and how bitterly we have been taught that life is not so much a drifting with the tide as making brave headway against it, we all know well enough to-day. Somewhere back of a vast deal in these modern religious cults and movements, is the smug optimism, now taking one form and now another, which was the misleading bequest of the nineteenth ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... much too expensive for him) of anti-League mischief and crime; how after lunch Charles had attended the meetings of the sub-committees on the Disappearance of Delegates, going from one to another looking business-like and smug and as if he were at strictly private meetings, as indeed he was. Then up to his room for his tea (Charles never missed this meal) and down again to see how Sub-Committee 5 ("Consideration of Various Suspicions based on Reason and Common Sense") was getting ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... pliancy that he deigned to lie for two nights in Judas, and at a grand refection in Hall "was gracious and merrie." Perhaps it was in lingering gratitude for such patronage that Judas remained so pious to his memory even after smug Herrenhausen had been dumped down on us for ever. Certainly, of all the Colleges none was more ardent than Judas for James Stuart. Thither it was that young Sir Harry Esson led, under cover of night, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... checked herself, aware of something almost ludicrously pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable figure. Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game to take the consequences. But to smite a creature conspicuously your inferior in fortune—past, present, and prospective—is ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... afford a smug smile. For hadn't he risen gloriously from Thieves Row to director of famed U.T.? Was not Earth, Moon, and all the Belt, at this very moment awaiting his command for the grand coup? And wasn't his cousin-from-Montehedo a ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... catch the assailant's hard-driven fist in the palm of an instantly extended hand and then let drive with his own right a neat, short-arm uppercut that got Bert just where he had meant to get Gus, was a needed lesson to the smug conceit that too often goes with added school years. Bert, from a seat on the floor, which he had taken without choice of the spot, regarded his opponent through half-closed eyes with a certain nonchalance, his anger fled. He slowly got to his feet, ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... must first be covered with new of the same colour. Generally speaking, it is desirable that the characteristics of an old book should be preserved, and that the new work should be as little in evidence as possible. It is far more pleasant to see an old book in a patched contemporary binding, than smug and tidy in ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... exceedingly busy in calculating the chances of a huge fight—indeed they spend a good part of each year in that pleasing employment. Smug diplomatists talk glibly about "war clearing the air;" and the crowd—the rank and file—chatter as though war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere harmless hurly-burly where certain battalions receive ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... others are perhaps, in the queer webwork of human relations, due to some calousness of our own. Who knows? Some man may have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we looked so intolerably smug in Philadelphia! ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... whatever he might have felt, was far too astute to show any sign of ill temper. His eternal smile was as smug as ever and so also was it over the duet ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... three at once—Charlie Sands said this was impossible, until he met Tufik. Aggie was fairly palpitant and Tish was smug, positively smug. As for me, I roused with a start to find ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... perhaps, approach her again? Some time! after she had forgotten him, after his unworthiness had been proved to her, and some other fellow, some happier man who had never been exposed to such a fate as had fallen upon him, some smug Pharisee (this fling at the supposed rival of the future was very natural and harmed nobody) had cut him out of all place in her heart! It was so likely that Chatty would go on waiting for him, thinking of him, for years perhaps, the coxcomb that ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... had deduced earlier. These passengers were stodgy Dutchmen, each with a little world of his own, and forming the sole orbit of that little world. For the most part they were plantation owners escaping the seasonal heat for the cool breezes of a vacation in Japan, boastful of their possessions, smug in their Dutch self-complacency, and somewhat gluttonous in their manner ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... to reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content (erbrmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose—the elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... artistic work. There will be fewer stories, I trust, where sentiment is no longer a part, but the whole of life. Most of all, form, the form, the formula, will relax its grip upon the short story, will cease its endless tapping upon the door of interest, and its smug content when some underling (while the brain sleeps) answers its stereotyped appeal. And we may get more narratives like Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan Frome," to make us feel that now as much as ever there is ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... situation to rant at smug William, the linen draper. The old sea wolf who had outlived the most glorious era of the storied buccaneers, had a few gold pieces tucked away in his belt and at first he was content to loaf about the tavern, with ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... smug. It's just another worldful of people with the same old likes, dislikes and hatreds. But they are evolving a way of living together, without violence, that may some day form the key to mankind's survival. They are worth looking after. Now get below ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... she carried. Then she turned and surveyed the hall and the library beyond. A new portrait of Natalie was there, hanging on the wall under a shaded light, and she wandered in, still with her cigaret, and surveyed it. Natalie had everything. The portrait showed it. It was beautiful, smug, complacent. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the room; one, rather fat, with a smug look and a smartly dressed wife, Jean decided must have married an heiress; another, with very prominent teeth and kind eyes, was accompanied by an extremely aged mother and two ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... advantages lie with the High School senior. He is four years younger. He has lost no illusions. He has developed no sense of values. He is not conscious of the world outside his vision. But in spite of a smug conviction of superiority, the college senior has heard life knocking at the door of his young illusions. He has moments of wistful uncertainty. No, it is the High School ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and put his machine at high speed. The sea receded, the Jersey pines whirled monotonously by, and by and by the hills began to crop up. Off against the horizon Stark mountain loomed, veiled, with a purple haze, and around another curve Economy appeared, startlingly out of place with its smug red brick walks and its gingerbread porches and plastered tile bungalows. Then without warning Billy sat up. How long had that young scamp been awake? Had he slept at all? He was like a man, grave and stern with business before him. The doctor almost felt shy about ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... it would sound a little—smug?" Canby asked timidly. "The way we've got him now, Roderick seems to me to be always seeing himself as a splendid man and sort of pointing it ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... need to tell her. She saw the smug red gleam of their own private car standing on the track not far away. She was brought face to face with the fact that her friends were down there in the valley and all the stiff conventionalities of her life stood ready to ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... Barr. If Joe should happen to meet Marie, he would manage somehow to let her know that Bud was going to the dogs—on the toboggan—down and out—whatever it suited Joe to declare him. It made Bud sore now to think of Joe standing so smug and so well dressed and so immaculate beside the bar, smiling and twisting the ends of his little brown mustache while he watched Bud make such a consummate fool of himself. At the time, though, Bud had taken a perverse delight in making himself appear more soddenly drunken, more boisterous ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world and take it. He ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is Abimelech Henley! A's a cunnin warm old codger—A tell her that—And says you, here Missee says you am I, at your onnurable Ladyship's reverend sarvice. My father has a got the rhino—A don't forget to tell her that—Smug and snug and all go snacks—Do you mind me? And so, says you, I have a paradventerd umbelly to speak my foolish thofts, says you. That is take me ritely, your Ladyship, says you; under your Ladyship's purtection and currection, and every think of that there umbel and very submissive obedient kind, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... (c) the three men are not brothers. They are given the magic objects as a reward for kindness. The sentimental denouement reads somewhat smug and strained after all three men have been represented as equally kind-hearted. The shooting-contest with arrows to decide the question, however, may be reminiscent of the "1001 Nights" version. For the resuscitating flute in droll stories, see Bolte-Polivka's notes to ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... well-known character of the King, thirsting for what is interesting and important, to find that "interesting" and "much celebrated" pauperism on his own soil, in conjunction with an opportunity of making people talk about him afresh. How smug he must have felt at the news that henceforth he possessed his "own" Royal ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... all but reached the smug bathos of a mutual admiration society turned astonished ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old lady, looked like old Roebuck himself—the same smug piety, the same underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than a starved body. One difference—where his face had the look of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... I saw a wan domestic drudge Scuttering across a smug suburban lawn; Tired with the nightly watch, the morning trudge, The toil ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... this does not make him less interesting as a figure in that amusing literarified society; and we may be glad to see him in Parma with Signor Torelli's eyes, as he "issues smug, ornate, with his well-fitting, polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking, his whole immaculate person, and his demure visage, and, gently sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... with the difficulty of treating a number of figures seated in regular rows. The types of the lawyers are truly admirable. In this latter piece there are no less than thirty-five faces, all characteristic, showing the peculiar smug and pedantic cast of the barristerial lineaments. Note specially the one at the end of the third bench who is engrossed in his brief, the pair in the centre who are discussing something, the two standing up. But what is specially excellent is the selection ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... say that," remarked George when Buster made such a remark; "but I don't believe it, judging from the smug way your belt hugs you just now. I rather think you are fond of seeing things go ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... honorable practitioner within it. One of the perplexing and irritating problems of the personal life of the preacher today has to do with the collision between the secular standards of his time, this traditional code of his class, and the requirements of his faith. Shall he acquiesce in the smug conformities, the externalized procedures of average society, somewhat pietized, and join that large company of good and ordinary people, of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in The Way of All Flesh, that they would be "equally horrified at hearing ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... to bear any other name all his days. Therefore Sapt let Mr. Rassendyll doubt and struggle, while he himself wrote his story and laid his long-headed plans. And now and then James, the little servant, came in and went out, sedate and smug, but with a quiet satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. He had made a story for a pastime, and it was being translated into history. He at least would bear his part ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... Nancy said, "and I think that any woman who doesn't is just confusing issues, and taking refuge in sophistry. I wouldn't give that"—she snapped an energetic forefinger, "for all your silly, smug little ideas of economic independence and service to the race, and all that tommy-rot. There is only one service a woman can do to her race, and that is to take hold of the problems of love and marriage,—and the problems of life, birth and death that are involved ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... odd all the world knows, but his oddity is far more amusing than repulsive, far more playful than bearish. Yates's picture of him last year was not bad; neither was it good—it wanted the raciness of the original. Let the reader imagine a smug, elderly, sleek, and venerable-looking man, approaching seventy years of age, rather (as novel-writers say) below than above the middle height, somewhat inclined to corpulency, and upright in his carriage withal; with his hair most primly powdered, and nicely curled round his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... judgement, without collusion or comparison of results—are practically identical. They are virtually in complete agreement. Now, the strange thing is this: their conclusions are wrong in every instance" (here I nearly laughed aloud, for, as I glanced at the two experts, the expression of smug satisfaction on their countenances changed with lightning rapidity to a ludicrous spasm of consternation); "not sometimes wrong and sometimes right, as would have been the case if they had made mere guesses, but wrong every time. ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... knew what they were about," Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately he adopted the smug tone best calculated to sting Farrell out of his first self-reproach, and grinned when the navigator bristled defensively. "Some of their enjoinders seem a little stuffy and obvious at times, ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... at the first excuse. The sight of the girl, fresh-skinned from a wash in the river, instead of soothing, further inflamed him. Her glowing well-being seemed bought at his expense. Her words of concern spoke to his sick ear with a note of smug, ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... all its forms had inspired Average Jones with a profound contempt and dislike for the cruelest of all forms of swindling medical quackery. And this swollen, smug-faced intruder looked a particularly offensive specimen of his kind. Therefore ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... struck his flag, dismantled his table, and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hieropath. The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet, and a rakish cap decorated with white satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore an embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned and dribbled self-consciously, and showed his two ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... of the man he so loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man, attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy; but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him worse—disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who knew the tragedy of Kittrell's ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... village spotlight, sallying forth into the wide world—and a little gay and thrilled. The morning was coming steadily up the sky; the daily miracle was going on. And she was going on—on! Old Sally's scoldings didn't matter, nor Marty's smug confidence. She shivered a little but kept her eyes on the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... captain, as smug a hypocrite as ever scuttled a ship, had intended to run the Durande on the Hanways. His belt contained three thousand pounds. He meant to lose the ship on the Hanways, a mile from shore, and when the passengers had rowed away, pretending that he would go down with the ship, Clubin ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bitterly. "As for you, Brenton, I wonder you're not as bad as Baalam's ass. If they could have their way, they would strip you of your clerical broadcloth and robe you in a full suit of angelic eider down. Still, you needn't look smug, while you deny it; it's nothing to be proud about. It's not your preaching does it, man; it's chiefly on account of your voice, and the way your hair sprouts from your scalp. For pure purposes of religion, a hairy baritone is a long way more potent than ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... expected nothing less than an exposure of his oft broken promises and the long delayed payment of his debt; but as the old man proceeded without allusion to his shortcomings, he had regained his courage, and his usual smug appearance of righteous peace ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... very much larger than he had imagined; the starlight had illuminated only a small portion of its white facade, tricking him; for this was almost a palace—one of those fine vigorously designed mansions, so imposing in simplicity, nicknamed by smug humility—a "cottage," or "villa." ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... COMINIUS! Unseasoned youth, or untried middle-age, A shouting boy, or a sleek-spoken elder, Hot stripling, cool supplanter! I serve not "Under COMINIUS," nay!—yet since he stands There, where I made firm footing amidst chaos, Stands in smug comfort where we Titans struggled— MOLTKE, and I, and the great Emperor,— Struggled for vantage, which he owes to us;— Since he stands there, and I in shadow sit, Silenced and chidden, I half feel I serve, Whom he would bid to second. Second him, In that Imperial Policy whose vast And soaring ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... after all, one of the best histories of the English nation, certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the Jesuits. But who can ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... a pathos in the words which the author may not have himself fully understood; whereas the similar expression of Tasso's Silvia quoted on a previous page is insufferable in its smug self-conceit. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... lease out his wife for a similar amount. Time was, in the Ellices, when the undue complaisance of a married woman meant a sudden and inartistic compression of the jugular, or a swift blow from the heavy, ebony-wood club of the wronged man. Nowadays, since the smug-faced native teacher hath shown them the Right Way, such domestic troubles are condoned by—a dollar. That is, if it be a genuine American dollar or two British florins; for outraged honour would not accept ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... instantly but painlessly killed. By such an act of an all-wise Providence I would at once become heir to one million dollars. It was a beautiful, satisfying dream. Even MY conscience accepted it with a smug smile. It was so vivid a dream that I sat guiltily expectant, waiting for the crash to come, for the shrieks and screams, for the rush of ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... of the greatest of these monuments of the past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration which had stripped it of its altars, its shrines and its tombs of unnumbered kings" was the target for two years of German shell and shrapnel and today it stands gaunt and scathed in a circle of ruin. But even in its ruin it shows infinite majesty ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... guessed because they were all quite sure what Alligator had done. They went out in a body to look for him. He lay beside the barn with his eyes shut and a smug smile on his face. Muffled grunts and squeals sounded from ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and boasted of a new club of which he was the president? How could Wright put up with his moderate salary and stand all day at that prison window? What could the limp, pale-faced stenographers in their simple dresses hope for? Did they expect to marry, ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... there could be anything like that battle. He never 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, worse ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... temporarily of our petty cares and grievances, and are permitted to live for a little while in an altogether different world—the world not of things and ambitions and cares, but of ecstasy. Such performances and such an attitude on the part of the listener are all too rare in these days of smug intellectualism and hypersophistication, and we venture to assert that this is at least partly due to the fact that many present-day conductors are intellectual rather than emotional in ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... me. My father in a rough stern voice bade him speak with more reverence of sacred things, on which the pair of them gave tongue together, swearing tenfold worse than before, and calling my father a canting rogue and a smug-faced Presbytery Jack. What more they might have said I know not, for my father picked up the great roller wherewith he smoothed the leather, and dashing at them he brought it down on the side of one of their heads with such a swashing blow, that had it not been for his stiff hat ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said in a satisfied way—"only got to smug a couple of krises, and there we are. I say, my leg smarts, and I should like to have a look at it; but I won't light a match, because it would be risky in amongst these leaves—and I ain't got one. Well, that will do for ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... of the door of his house to meet him on his return. It was a rash vow, I am ready to admit. Yet rash as it was, I do not find it in my heart to be severely critical of him. I rather join with Dr. Peck in my admiration. You know what is the matter with a great many of us smug church members? We are so prudent. We have such admirable possession of all our faculties. We are in danger of dying of self-control. This man in the white heat of his enthusiasm made a solemn pledge to the Lord of that which was destined ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... that Perion knew, now, de Montors had been in the right. The pity and mystery and beauty of that world wherein High God had— scornfully?—placed a smug Perion, seemed to the Comte de la Foret, I think, unbearable. I think a new and finer love smote Perion as a ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... been nothing worse in the Old Bachelor and Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton, calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that, when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious charges to make. Instead of doing this, he pretended that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a worthy silk-mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, stout and substantial, a judge in the commercial court, a father of four children, and the husband of a second wife. At the age of fifty-six, with a cap of gray hair on his head, he had the smug appearance of a man who has his eighty thousand francs of income; and having been forced to put up with a good deal that he did not like in the way of business, has fully made up his mind to enjoy the rest of his life, and not to quit this earth until ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... evening," said Lee, but he got no rejoinder to that. He looked at the company, and his small, smug, fatuous face, which was somewhat pale and haggard, frowned with astonishment. Again he looked for information into Carroll's unanswering face. He looked at an empty chair near him; then he looked at ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... enjoys the same advantages, although nobody ever saw him smile; but, then, an animal soon to become extinct can scarcely be expected to smile. In the smile of White's Green Frog, however, I fear, a certain smug, Pecksniffian quality is visible. "I am a Numble individual, my Christian friends," he seems to say, "and my wants, which are few and simple, are providentially supplied. Therefore, I am Truly Happy. It is no great merit in my merely batrachian nature that I am Truly Happy; a cheerful countenance, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... heroic qualities are his passport. He cannot seem smug, nor colourless, nor over-prosperous: he is too vivid and too vigorous. His childish vanity is nobly discounted by his childlike simplicity in facing big issues. The blue and gold which he wore so magnificently can never to us be the mere trappings of rank: they carry on them the shadows of battle ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... your sort did!' exclaimed this personage. 'Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you're just back where you were before. Why, blast it all, that's just where we all want to be—back where we were before! That is revolution—going right round! Every revolution, like ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... overact, overdo. Adj. affected, full of affectation, pretentious, pedantic, stilted, stagy, theatrical, big-sounding, ad captandum; canting, insincere. not natural, unnatural; self-conscious; maniere; artificial; overwrought, overdone, overacted; euphuist &c 577. stiff, starch, formal, prim, smug, demure, tire a quatre epingles, quakerish, puritanical, prudish, pragmatical, priggish, conceited, coxcomical, foppish, dandified; finical, finikin; mincing, simpering, namby-pamby, sentimental. Phr. conceit in weakest ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... because we were going after the "Chosen People" in literature. It was Leslie Stephen who said, "The term Philistine is a word used by prigs to designate people they do not like." When you call a man a bad name, you are that thing—not he. The Smug and Snugly Ensconced Denizens of Union Square called me a Philistine, and I said, "Yes, I am one, if a Philistine is something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... years without knowing it. Her existence was losing its savor, and she was still so young and eager and keen to live. Surely this round of social frivolities, the chatter of these silly women and smug tailor-made men, could not be all there was to life. She must have been made ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... melancholy pageantry traverses the streets of wealthy quarters, and it stalks abroad hourly in the slums, and few there are who gaze after it. But here it comes so seldom that its dread features are not made smug by familiarity. When Hite was told to look again at the face and see if memory might not have played him false, to make sure he had never seen the man before yesterday, he hesitated, and advanced with such reluctance, and started back, dropping the cloth, with such swift repulsion, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... prairies, who had thought as much about the chances of swimming over swollen fords as of their cases, who had passed their nights—a half-dozen together—on the floors of wayside hostelries, could never be precisely the same sort of practitioners as the smug barristers of a more conventional age and place. But they were not deficient in ability, in learning, or in that most valuable faculty which enables really intelligent men to get their bearings and sustain themselves ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... were a social and political force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War. The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be altogether a Yankee. The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and sterile New England. The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the often-quoted saying, "Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of this globe for a man to be born ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... turns our sternest resolves to ridicule. On the next street-corner was a hair-dresser's shop, its genial little proprietor, plump and smug, rubbing his hands and smiling in the doorway. Beholding the commanding figure of the yellow-bearded young aristocrat, afar off, his professional mouth watered over him. What a harvest for shears and razor was here! Dare he hope that to him would ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... their constraint and silence were far from reassuring. Nor, when the sitting had begun, did he like the enigmatic smile with which the well-dressed Paige stood and swung his watch-chain. How he distrusted and feared this smug, self-complacent young man! Yet the state's attorney's first words brought ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... was there before me of reward or honor? I was no longer "an officer and a gentleman," I was a copying clerk, "a model letter-writer." I could foresee the end. I would become a nervous, knowing, smug-faced civilian. Instead of clean liquors, I would poison myself with cocktails and "quick-order" luncheons. I would carry a commuter's ticket. In time I might rise to the importance of calling the local conductors by their familiar names. "Bill, what ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... he was nearly forty years old, he made his first literary hit with Sartor Resartus which called out a storm of caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug English public regarded with reverence—all these features aroused irritation. Four years later came The French Revolution, which established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers. From this time on he was freed ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... have no such means of travel," continued the Atlantean, with a touch of smug pride that reminded Nelson of a small town Middle Westerner speaking of the "rightest, tightest little ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... out of it for good and all. So did we think. We were as smug as you are when France went down in '71.... Yours is only one further degree of insularity. You think this vacuous aloofness of yours is some sort of moral superiority. So did we, so ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... paints the sky, And every splendid noontide high, All know the Glugs so well, so well. 'Tis an easy matter, and plain to tell. For, lacking wit, with a candour smug, A Glug will boast that he is a Glug. And they climb the trees, if it shines or rains, To settle the squirming in their brains, And the darting pains That are caused by rushing and ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... him, his gown floating black, lurched, unsteadily, near the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Then another, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky; another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights were lit ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... clerical work. The some one must be absolutely trustworthy, as the plain language of the agreement would make clear to the dullest mind dazzling opportunities for profit—not only in stock jobbing but also in blackmail. He rang for Tetlow, the head clerk. Tetlow—smooth and sly and smug, lacking only courageous initiative to make him a great lawyer, but, lacking that, lacking all—Tetlow entered and ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... unpleasant addition to sepulchral sentiment is here the fashion: photographs of the departed set into the stone. You see an elegant and genteel marble cross: there on the pedestal above the name is the photo:—a smug man with bourgeois whiskers,—a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,—a woman well attired and conscious of it: you cannot think how indecent looked the pretension of such types to the dignity of ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... truth—Oh, God! what do you know about the truth? Your business is crawling up into a little power, that you may use it by tantalizing, morally and physically, people a thousand times better than you.... You sit there in your smug authority torturing people. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... certainly would not have expected to find such a competitor in Dick Derosne. In fact, neither of the young men was capable of appreciating the attractions of the other: Dick considering Norburn very doubtfully a gentleman, and very certainly what in his University days he dubbed a "smug"; Norburn regarding him with the rather impatient contempt that such a man is apt to bestow on those for whom dressing themselves and amusing themselves are the chief labours of a day. Moreover, Norburn did not frequent dances, and ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... and churchyard, he noted many changes in its immediate neighborhood but the only one upon which his eye lingered was a smug brick house of commodious proportions and genteel aspect. A pleasant green yard afforded space for a few trees and flowers. A dignified and prosperous, but not in the least romantic house it was. A house with ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard |
