"Smugness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poem Mr. Lanier says in a letter of March, 1874: "Of course, since I have written it to print I cannot make it such as *I* desire in artistic design: for the forms of to-day require a certain trim smugness and clean-shaven propriety in the face and dress of a poem, and I must win a hearing by conforming in some degree to these tyrannies, with a view to overturning them in the future. Written so, it is not nearly so beautiful as I would have ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... aware of the eager expressions on the faces of the Earthworms and he smiled to himself. It was not a smile of smugness or conceit, but rather of honest satisfaction. More than once he had shaken his head in wonder at being a Space Cadet. The odds against it were enormous. Each year thousands of boys from all the major planets and the occupied satellites competed for ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... It was very much the reverse. Its fundamental condition was the profoundest instinct that controlled living; there no merely admirable conduct could manage to be more than a false and degrading, a temporary, lie. How could he with a pandering smugness meet Fanny's purity of feeling? Yet, it seemed, exactly this was being done by countless other applauded men. But, probably, the difference between them and himself was that they had no objective consciousness of their course; happily they never stopped to think. It was thought, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... said Abner Sawyer, a little white; "I am not myself." And for a wild moment his sore heart flamed again at Jimsy's revolutionizing intrusion into the quiet smugness of ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... himself a faint smile. The cruelty of the soldier, accustomed to violent deaths, was in it. There was, too, a curious smugness, a secret complacency. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... free and artistic one. The Peter Champneyses of the world challenge the ideal of commercial success by their utter inability to see in it the real reason for being alive, and the chief end of man. They are inimical to smugness and to complacent satisfaction. Naturally, safe and ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler |
