Too Complacent Quotes & Sayings

If people are not safe, they will not make themselves vulnerable. If they feel too comfortable, they can become complacent or lose their curiosity. They can become intellectually lazy about what matters most. — Erica Brown

Most people aren't happy. They sing songs like they are. Make up cute little stories. Post pics of the rare times when life wasn't dreadful. Most people are stomaching this whole affair called life. Are these people complainers? Probably. Most are. But they're also just blokes who're too afraid to take a risk. So they live lives in a redundant cycle of complacent apathy. Then these people wallow around day after day in their unhappiness. The more you do that, the more you lose sight of the chances you could take to make things better. — Sarah Noffke

I think the biggest challenge is to continue on the same path. I think it's easy to become complacent from the success you've had. — Jason Derulo

When you're used to having nothing, nothing becomes your everything, and you never really want for anything. But it's a double-edged sword, because there's the danger of becoming complacent, becoming too happy with that nothing, because you've never known anything better. Complacency is the death of dreams, and freedom. — Isaac Hooke

Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and, as the theory would predict, they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called 'cantankerous,' 'crazy,' 'hysterical,' 'uppity,' or 'duped.' Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It's a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, 50 is a movement. — Carol Tavris

Perhaps you don't desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you. — Orson Scott Card

I believe that we are all born for greatness yet most of us mire in the mediocrity of life. We become complacent or worse, discouraged and stagnate. We damn ourselves by not progressing. — Toni Sorenson

That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Perhaps the greatest reason for missionary work is to give the world it's chance to hear and accept the gospel. The scriptures are replete with commands and promises and calls and rewards for teach the gospel. I use the word command deliberately for it seems to be an insistent directive from which we, singly and collectively, cannot escape ... I wonder if we are doing all we can. Are we complacent in our approach to teaching all the world? We have been proselyting now 144 years. Are we prepared to lengthen our stride? To enlarge our vision? — Spencer W. Kimball

I'm afraid of being lazy and complacent. I'm afraid of taking myself too seriously. — Barbara Hershey

The image of the unions is still not in tune with where we actually are, which is fifty-fifty men and women, with an increasing number of women at the top. I think it is changing, but I'm not complacent about this. — Frances O'Grady

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. — Robert Macfarlane

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey
chanced, unplanned, solitary
was the thing to relish.
Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own ... — Rohinton Mistry

You may say that I had gone to ask Megan to marry me in an absurdly complacent frame of mind and that I deserved what I got - but it was not really like that. It was because I felt so assured, so certain, that Megan belonged to me - that she was my business, that to look after her and make her happy and keep her from harm was the only natural right way of life for me, that I had expected her to feel, too - that she and I belonged to each other.
But I was not giving up. Oh, no! Megan was my woman and I was going to have her. — Agatha Christie

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent or self-satisfied; they are, if sound, the spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them. — Abraham Flexner

[I am enthusiastic about journalism because] it's a craft that can ... galvanize an often complacent citizenry, and make a difference. — Katie Couric

For at the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation had been struggling to find its way. Terror had raged, a second civil war had threatened to split the nation into new feuding armies, and the inequities of industrial life had brutalized too many lives. Three men who were caught up in those traumatic times, shaped by them, found with their talents, energy, and ideals a way out of it, both for themselves and for the nation. Darrow, Billy, D.W. were all flawed - egotists, temperamental, and too often morally complacent. But as their careers and lives intersected in Los Angeles at the tail end of the first decade of the twentieth century, each in his own way helped to move America into the modern world. They were individuals willing to fight for their beliefs; and the legacy of their battles, their cultural and political brawls, remains part of our national consciousness. — Howard Blum

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician. — Georg Solti

I think people are complacent about sound, because we're so limited by the textures and timbres we hear in music, but in our everyday life we hear the most incredible things. — Herbert

So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate? — Jodi Picoult

Dear Die-ary, there's nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their "discomfort" like a favorite shirt. I can't say I'm very pleased with where my life is just now ... but I can't help but look forward to where it's going. — Jhonen Vasquez

The genius of the heart, that makes everything loud and complacent fall silent and learn to listen, that smoothes out rough souls and gives them the taste of a new desire - to lie still, like a mirror that the deep sky can mirror itself upon ... they are made richer in themselves, newer than before, broken open, sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps less certain, more gentle, fragile, and broken, but full of hopes that do not have names yet, full of new wills and currents, of indignations and countercurrents ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't want to let my guard down and feel too comfortable. If you become complacent, you start feeling entitled. I'm ready to go dig ditches if I have to. Whatever I gotta do to provide for my family. Whatever I gotta do to make sure that I do the best possible job at whatever wonderful opportunities I've been handed. — Mark Wahlberg

This is the true test of a man. He who will stand when others grow complacent. — Brandon Sanderson

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. — Christopher Hitchens

We tried to create advantages. We were never complacent. — Bobby Rahal

You need to motivate yourself, no matter what-definitely when things are bad, but also when things are good. Or else, you risk becoming complacent. — Viswanathan Anand

I am not one who, to quote an American author, believes that democracy and enterprise have finally won the battle of ideas - that we have therefore arrived at the end of history, and there is nothing left to fight for. That would be unutterably complacent, indeed foolish. There will always be threats to freedom, not only from frontal assaults, but more insidiously by erosion from within. — Margaret Thatcher

Either people challenge each other to the point where they don't like each other or they become complacent about each other's feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. — Ben Horowitz

Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess. — Shashi Tharoor

It's just, you can get very complacent if you do the same thing all the time and especially [comedy], it gives me different things to react to and respond to, and it stimulates me,. — Ellen DeGeneres

I believe that people are too complacent about technology. — Peter Thiel

What possessed you?" Lauren demanded of Jim the next morning.
He grinned. "Call it an uncontrollable impulse."
"I call it insanity!" she burst out. "You can't imagine how furious he was.He called me names! I-I think he's insane."
"He is," Jim agreed with complacent satisfaction. "He's insane about you. Mary thinks so too."
Lauren rolled her eyes. "You're all insane. I have to work up there with him. How am I going to do that?"
Jim chuckled. "Very,very cautiously," he advised. — Judith McNaught

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

Don't be over complacent or too feverish, take a middle path. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature
poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. — Henry Seidel Canby

But the very success which had intoxicated them rendered them also too complacent to learn from less prosperous competitors. — Olaf Stapledon

She consoled herself with the thought that the pictures were graphic enough to shake people up, stop them being complacent about what was happening, and if that meant the war would end sooner, those two deaths weren't in vain. As she hoped, with less and less confidence each day, that Michael's had not been in vain. Too much waste to bear. — Tatjana Soli

If we fail in this country, it is because we are too timid. If we lose our way in America, it is because we are too complacent. We must become conscious to the real threats before us and act creatively, imaginatively, now. We can no longer look to leadership beyond ourselves. — Terry Tempest Williams

Any time you add something to your game, you still have to find ways to improve, so I'm still studying the game and trying to find out ways to increase how we use me on the floor. You're not being complacent, not falling back and floating around the perimeter too much, figuring out when to attack. I'm trying to find that balance between attacking and spotting up and things like that. — Blake Griffin

I never did work in the off-season, and I never did play winter ball or anything else. I think it was good for me to get away after a full season ... In those days, I don't think anyone ever got too complacent. — Bobby Doerr

It almost seems as if autumn were the true creator, more creative than the spring, which is too even-toned, more creative when it comes with its will-to-change and shatters the much too ready-made, self-satisfied and really almost bourgeois-complacent image of summer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

(Regarding author Kim Stanley Robinson)
In an era filled with complacent dystopias and escapist apocalypses, Robinson is one of our best, bravest, most moral, and most hopeful storytellers. It's no coincidence that so many of his novels have as their set pieces long, punishing treks through unforgiving country with diminishing provisions, his characters exhausted and despondent but forcing themselves to slog on. What he's telling us over and over, like the voice of the Third Wind whispering when all seems lost, is that it's not too late, don't get scared, don't give up, we're almost there, we can do this, we just have to keep going. — Tim Kreider

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do. — Brad Stone

There's an adage that a lot of coaches have, that I completely disagree with, is if you make the Olympic team too early you become complacent. — Natalie Coughlin

Fear and love might leave a man complacent, but jealousy will always get him out of the van. — Brock Clarke

I should say that generally I'm a pretty happy person, but as soon as I'm done with a project, I'm usually not happy at all. I feel a little empty and strange. I begin to think about how I can get better, stretch more artistically and intellectually. My biggest worry is getting complacent. — Philipp Meyer

An eager student is better than a complacent master. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive. — John F. Kennedy

I don't desire happiness. I think it's a myth, and I don't think it's ... and it makes you complacent. I feel very satisfyingly uncomfortable. I have the freedom to feel uncomfortable in the way I want to, is maybe a way to put it. — Beau Willimon

Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat. — Dan B. Allender

My coat and I live comfortably togther. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has moulded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and I only feel its presence because it keeps me warm. Old coats and old friends are the same thing. — Victor Hugo

Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity. — Nancy Pearcey

Women have to do all of the catching up. So we are disengaged and overburdened. Sounds like it is time we ditch the complacent fluoride-in-the-tap-water feminism and get reenergized and reinspired. — Amy Richards

There's still so much more to do. I can't sit back and be complacent, and none of us should be. I get around now in a wheelchair, but I get around. — Elizabeth Taylor

Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for? — Eleanor Roosevelt

I had been in love all year, or at least since the first week in September, when a boy named Martin Collingwood had given me a surprised, appreciative, and rather ominously complacent smile in the school assembly. I never knew what surprised him; I was not looking like anybody but me; I had an old blouse on and my home-permanent had turned out badly. — Alice Munro

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night
hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe? — Kathryn Davis

The Cubists' belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production. — John Berger

What I love about the thriller form is that it makes you write a story. You can't get lost in your own genius, which is a dangerous place for writers. You don't want to ever get complacent. If a book starts going too well, I usually know there's a problem. I need to struggle. I need that self-doubt. I need to think it's not the best thing ever. — Harlan Coben

People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening. — Anita Brookner

I seriously don't take praise to my heart or to my head. I only want to work harder and never get complacent. — Katrina Kaif

To me, to live is to fight. It's about persevering. It's about testing yourself. It's about not becoming complacent. — Rashad Evans

When the prophet, a complacent fat man,
Arrived at the mountain-top
He cried: Woe to my knowledge!
I intended to see good white lands
And bad black lands
But the scene is grey. — Stephen Crane

Twelve strangers," he interrupted, "twelve citizens picked off the street. In this world we're unfortunate to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on,where squalid politicians conspire with the squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I'm sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal. — Reginald Hill

I think that one of the biggest flaws of
mankind is that we become complacent with our lives. — Daniel Willey

Revival is the spiritual resurrection of a person, congregation, region or nation that has lost its first love and grown cold to the passion and purpose that blazes in the heart of God. Revival is the rebirth of consecration and devotion in the lives of those who have grown complacent and have been compromised by a lifestyle that has become encumbered by the cares of this world. — Michael Brodeur

You can never get complacent because a loss is always around the corner. — Venus Williams

Just because you can watch half-nude women on afternoon television or gay men kissing on the streets of nearly any major city does not mean America is free, as complacent liberals might think, much less too free, as conservatives often suggest. Just because most dissidents are left alone doesn't mean there is no police state, for that would be convenient indeed for the police statists: the idea that people ought not complain so long as they have the right to do so. — Anthony Gregory

Behold the complacent salesman retailing the Good and True.
One can even buy a so-called Religion, which is really but common
morality sanctified with flowers and music. Rob the Church of her
accessories and what remains behind? Yet the trusts thrive marvelously,
for the prices are absurdly cheap,
a prayer for a ticket to heaven,
a diploma for an honorable citizenship.Hide yourself under a bushel
quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would
soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. — Okakura Kakuzo

One of the biggest threats to success is success itself. When you get a little bit ahead, it's all too easy to become complacent and to quickly lose what you have gained. — Ralph Marston

I wake up every morning excited. Rather than become complacent or overwhelmed, I've made a choice for life - and I can do something about it. — Gary Holland

There is satisfaction in defeating an enemy. But one must never allow oneself to become complacent. There are always more enemies to be identified, faced, and vanquished. — Timothy Zahn

Although people sometimes assume that the happy are self-absorbed and complacent, just the opposite is true. In general, happiness doesn't make people want to drink daiquiris on the beach; it makes them want to help rural villagers gain better access to clean water. — Gretchen Rubin

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. — Louis De Bernieres

I don't ever want to feel complacent. — Taraji P. Henson

I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried - who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out. — Paul Newman

In this new, hyper competitive age, none of us, none of us can afford to be complacent. — Barack Obama

As soon as you become complacent your show gets canceled. — Dick Wolf

He could feel himself gliding down like the sail of a weightless craft, forever plunging into the great beyond below where mermaids sing and summon their lovers home, further down into the depths of some complacent serenity, further down where thoughts float away and never return and the lightness is so grand that there is no other worldly place imaginable, for there is no world left to be
considered. There is only the soul, free from the prison of the body, and it is released to travel
another millennium through time, carrying with it the progress and industry gathered from the
mind previously occupied. — Matthew Chase Stroud