Smugness Quotes

“Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“You unfailingly omnibothersome bitch.”
― Scott Lynch, Rogues

“...my editor had crossed out my first go at this sentence and written Hypo=cold, Hyper=hot in the margin, in that helpful yet smug voice editors are born with, wishing to both correct you and impart their correctness upon you at the same time.”
― Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

“moral voices can also become sanctimonious bullies.”
― Nicholas Kristof

“Deeply convinced of the reality of the divine will, he (Lincoln) had no patience at all with any who were perfectly sure they knew the details of the divine will.”
― Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership

“Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life's greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I flash a fake smile of my own, refraining from telling her what I'm really thinking: that it's an unwise karmic move to go around feeling superior to other mothers. Because before she knows it, her little angel could become a tattooed teenager hiding joints in her designer handbag and doling out blow jobs in the backseat of her BMW.”
― Emily Giffin, Heart of the Matter

“Complacency traps people and besiege them until longer period. The biggest challenge is to become aware of its existence and stepping out of it quickly.”
― Ashish Patel

“Success stood in some people’s way of moving from being good to being great.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Clo was looking like the cat who got the cream, the kippers, the peanut butter, the sliced chicken and a lifetime's supply of genetically engineered slow-moving mice.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“I find you very charming underneath all the smugness.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“He (Lincoln) differed from fanatical moralists primarily in that he was always perplexed. No sooner did he believe he was doing God's will that he began to admit that God's purposes might be different from his own. In short, he never forgot the men's contrast between the absolute goodness of God and the faltering goodness of all who are in the finite predicament.”
― Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership

“Contentment should not be confused with smugness… Contentment is being happy despite of the successes and failures.”
― Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon

“His work was defined by emphasis on the subversiveness philosophy, which asks questions, as opposed to the self-satisfaction of politics, which believes it has answers and insists on them.”
― Harvey Mansfield

“It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.”
― David Halberstam

“I want to strike Cardan over and over until I slap that smugness off his face. But if I did, he'd know just how much he scares me.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“There is no pastime so engrossing as being in the right.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies

“He thinks he's God's gift to all mankind,' said Sir Owen, shortly. 'He's American,'....”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood