C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Complacency
Complaisance renders a superior amiable, an equal agreeable, and an inferior acceptable.
Complacency is a coin by the aid of which all the world can, for want of essential means, pay his club-bill in society. It is necessary, finally, that it may lose nothing of its merits, to associate judgment and prudence with it.
Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato’s advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned.