"Self-complacent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half- pitying contempt for me—seen not in the ordinary indications of intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious mind is on the watch for, but in all their ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... composed an all-potent philter, which the sympathy of every spectator drank with intoxicating effect. She discriminated, with perfect truthfullness, the various degrees of acquaintance and friendship. She made all feel self-complacent, by her unaffected attention causing them to perceive that she wished their happiness and valued their good opinion. Ballanche tells her, "You feel yourself the impression you make on others, and are enveloped in the incense they burn at your feet." Wherever she went, as if a celestial ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... sin of the individual was shared in greater or less degree by all whose lives were opposed to the Divine order, and that pride, luxury, and avarice in one class gave motive and temptation to the grosser forms of evil in another. How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes of self-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of all its decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned with Pharisaical harshness! In his Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind be dwells with great ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... type of heroine. But also of the quiet domesticated wife we have a description from the same writer. Unfortunately the letter is one of the most priggish of all the rather self-complacent epistles written by that thoroughly respectable and estimable man; but that fact takes nothing from the information for which we are looking. Pliny is writing to his own wife's aunt. "You will be very glad to learn that ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker |
