The tragedy of ignorance is its complacency.
The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.
Mutual complacency is the atmosphere of conjugal love.
Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.
If I can leave a single message with the younger generation, it is to lash yourself to the mast, like Ulysses if you must, to escape the siren calls of complacency and indifference.
She'd always had such contempt for mundanes, the way all Shadowhunters did--she'd believed that they were soft, stupid, sheeplike in their complacency. Now she wondered if all that hatred didn't just stem from the fact that she was jealous. It must be nice not worrying that every time one of your family members walked out the door, they'd never come back.
Disability strips away complacency. Affliction is brutal, but it can also push vital questions to the fore. The afflicted body becomes a site of otherness, confusion, isolation, watchfulness, longing. One becomes keenly aware of the impersonality of brute matter, but at the same time there is often a raw, mistrustful desire for gentleness, connection.
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.
John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing -- like a faery breath! -- upon the glass.
Complaisance renders a superior amiable, an equal agreeable, and an inferior acceptable.
Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.
The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.
Privilege and complacency paralyze me with fear sometimes.
I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.
I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man.
Success is one of the worst enemies of success, because success tends to breed complacency and lack of humility.
I have spoken about what we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have to shatter our complacency and become "active souls,"and be prepared to engage in aware - that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't think we have any choice.
Once you have tasted conviction, you can’t bear to keep swallowing complacency.
