Quotes About Smugness

put his hands on Kim's shoulders, his expression was almost smug.

Smugness was easy in a world without dust or carrion smell or craters that had been factories.

And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor -- as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats!

Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey.

This carpet," said Abdullah, "unlike you, is of an ensorcellment so pure and excellent that it will listen only to the finest of language. It is at heart a poet among carpets." A certain smugness spread through the pile of the carpet. It held its tattered edges proudly straight and sailed sweetly forward into the golden sunlight above the mist.

Parochialism remains the Danes' defining characteristic, but their radically recalibrated sense of identity and national pride has created a curious duality best described as a kind of "humble pride," though many often mistake it for smugness.

The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith.

Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards ...

The conservative heretics were like all the others here in Dis: though they claimed to champion truth, in reality they loved something else more than truth—in this case, the comfort of their own smugness. It was a subtle form of idolatry, but idolatry nonetheless. Fancy that: feuding theological cousins—liberals and conservatives—the spitting image of each other, bedded down now side by side in flaming poetic justice.

A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle.

The lowest form of barbarism is smugly to berate someone for extending an act of kindness.