"Fatuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is—a singular compliment to the "Master Workman"—he executes a volte-face and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Francis brooked no surrender of his Italian possessions, and again Wuermser was spurred on from Vienna to another invasion of Venetia. It would be tedious to give an account of Wuermser's second attempt, which belongs rather to the domain of political fatuity than that of military history. Colonel Graham states that the Austrian rank and file laughed at their generals, and bitterly complained that they were being led to the shambles, while the officers almost openly exclaimed: "We must make peace, for we ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Thomas George Knox"; and when I protested that that gentleman was too honorable to engage in a secret intrigue against a colleague, even for the protection of British interests in Siam, he would rave at my indifference, the cupidity of the French, the apathy of the English, and the fatuity of all geographers in "setting down" the form of government in ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... be a thousand pities for Guy to miss this. He's so interested in the way we do things over here—and I don't know that he's ever heard me speak in public." Again the slight note of fatuity! Was it possible that Ransom ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... I have before said, the moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity ...
— English Satires • Various
... what kind of argument is that on the lips of those who but a short time before were explaining, with a good deal of zest and with absolute frankness, how they intended to compass our ruin? There is something almost amiable in fatuity like this. A touch of the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... scratch of the skin—a resistance which is not shown by many savage races—they yet allow house-flies to swarm in their dwellings, to run about and sample their food, with an indifference which is, when the truth is known, truly horrible in its fatuity and foolhardiness. For the fact is that the feet and proboscis of the common house-fly are covered with microbes of all sorts, picked up by his explorations upon every kind of filth. At every step which he takes he plants a few dozen microbes, which include those of infantile diarrhoea, typhoid, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... involved him in a difficulty,' he said. 'It is his own fault. I will leave him to meditate on the incredible fatuity—the hare-brained recklessness—which have brought him to this pass. It will be a lesson to him. I, meantime, will give myself unreservedly to the ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... laugh suddenly to reflect how wicked certain quips must sound in, say, Japanese. Perhaps his friends were rather inclined to resent the way he retained his balance after what was really an almost unheard-of hit. They would have been readier to pardon it had he shown some sign of boring fatuity; or perhaps they thought he might at least have had a temporary nervous breakdown; taking the form (for choice) of losing all sense of the value of money and wildly throwing bank-notes and gold at every one he saw. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... knight-errant on quest; I may say I don't know that I ever felt prouder, old friend, of a conquest. And when I've been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing who knew it; I Thank my stars I'm as free from mock-modesty, friend, as from vulgar fatuity. I can't say if my spirit retains—for the subject appears to me misty—any tie To such associations as Poesy weaves round the records of Christianity. There are bards—I may be one myself—who delight in their skill to unlock a lip's Rosy secrets by kisses and whispers of ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... smile at the fatuity of the thing, in her idle waiting she drew one of his matches from her pocket; then she struck it briskly on the rugged rock, and cast it, blazing lightly, into the bubbling ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... sustaining hope for the future. Among many alleviations, there was one, which, (not wisely, but overcome by circumstances) all were willing to admit;—that the event was so strange and uncouth, exhibiting such discordant characteristics of innocent fatuity and enormous guilt, that it could not without violence be thought of as indicative of a general constitution of things, either in the country or the government; but that it was a kind of lusus naturae, in the moral ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and how she had not been able to imagine herself leading the life it described. Now, in her travelling dress, pale and tired and subdued after the long journey, shorn of every grace of clothes and curls, she criticised her own fatuity in having held herself to be of too fine a clay, too delicate, too fragile, for a life that might be rough. "Oh, vain and foolish one!" she said aloud, apostrophising the figure in the glass with the familiar Du of the days before her mother ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Equal in fatuity, almost 150 years later, were the several attempts at escape concerted on behalf of the French royal family. The abortive escape to Varennes is now familiarly known to all the world, and impeaches ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... here cannot be regarded as an advertisement,—there are a dozen other bearded dress-makers in Paris whose talent is worthy of admiration, and whose caprices might amuse us if we had time to dwell upon them. There is, however, a grande couturiere who surpasses all her masculine rivals in fatuity and caprice, namely, Madame Rodrigues, the great theatrical dress-maker. Madame Rodrigues always asks the journalists not to mention her by name. "Put simply," she says, "the first dress-maker in Paris. Everybody will know who is meant." This lady regards herself as the collaborator ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... life was a triumph, and her mother triumphed with her at an humble distance. The Duchess had no daughter, and was devoted to her with the blind fatuity with which ladies of rank at times will invest themselves in a caprice. She arrogated to herself all the praises of her beauty and wit, allowed her to flirt and make conquests to her heart's content, and engaged to marry her to some handsome young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... laughing to himself over the retreat of Bott, thinking with some paternal fatuity of the attractiveness and spirit of his daughter, when a shadow fell across him, and he saw Offitt standing ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... of her folly should have taught her when it would be too late. Why Eleanor, if she wished to throw herself away, should pitch upon the South Seas for the place of her retirement, was a piece of the same mysterious fatuity which marked the whole proceeding. Why she could think of no pleasanter wedding journey than a voyage of twelve thousand miles in search of a husband, was but another incomprehensible point. Mrs. Powle had a curiosity to know what Eleanor expected ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... watery kind, and occasionally a little tawdry. His pathos, as is the case with all weak writers, constantly trembles on the verge of bathos, while his lack of humour betrays him into penning passages of elaborate fatuity. His style is formal and often stilted, his verse often monotonous and at times heavy.[262] On the other hand Daniel possesses qualities of no vulgar kind, though some, it is true, may be said to be ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... find that he had the power of reading, as they run, the revelations of the wire. I had the hope that he was about to explain to the public the more general use of this instrument,—which, with a stupid fatuity, the public has as yet failed to grasp. Because its signals have been first applied by means of electro-magnetism, and afterwards by means of the chemical power of electricity, the many-headed people refuses to avail itself, as it might do very ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... not forget that the South had shown itself blind to its own interests when, as soon as reconstructed by Andrew Johnson, it had, state by state, adopted laws virtually enslaving the black man again. But for this fatuity, there would probably have been no such feeling of vindictiveness at the North as soon developed there; certainly there would have been no excuse for such severity as was afterwards exhibited. So it is true in a sense that the South has itself ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... shan't lose me," the girl replied with charming gross fatuity. "My name's Jewish," she went on, "but it was that of my grandmother, my father's mother. She was a baroness in Germany. That is, she was ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the folly, the fatuity of what we had done, oppressed me like an iron band around the skull. Common sense told me that the man who had decoyed us into Chinatown would not be satisfied with robbery. And what were the lives of two "white devils" ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... patriot and says not a word to weaken his own Government and hearten its opponents. To this height of self-denial Fox rarely rose; and the judgement alike of his fellows and of posterity has pronounced this speech a masterpiece of partisan invective and of political fatuity. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... form which he had filled in. In spite of my misery I almost laughed at the fatuity of the man in thinking that those mere unimaginative statistics applicable to five hundred thousand young females in London, could in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... a ghastly sensation. I was plunged in the void. I—I—I can't tell you my exact sensation, but it was as if I was the loneliest creature in the whole of the universe, and as if I need not have been lonely, as if I, in my ignorance and fatuity, had selected loneliness thinking ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the collations made and to be made by us are valid ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... dreadful scenes of St. Domingo." The next day Rutledge again warned the House against even discussing the matter, as "very serious, nay, dreadful effects, must be the inevitable consequence." He held up the most lurid pictures of the fatuity of the French Convention in listening to the overtures of the "three emissaries from St. Domingo," and thus yielding "one of the finest islands in the world" to "scenes which had never been practised since the ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to be back among the truly great race," I surmised. "Especially among New Yorkers, the most progressive and independent citizens of any country in the world," I continued, with the fatuity of the provincial who has ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... some truths that you have never learned," he persisted, "the fatuity of mere bravado, the uses of life. You couldn't play with it if you knew something ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... the better rather than the worse for it; but to care for that which our care cannot touch, and to be troubled about that which is entirely beyond our sphere—this is the burden that breaks the back of the world—this is the burden which we bind to our shoulders with obstinate fatuity. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... (slovenly writer). On the edges at the right: "Mozart and Haydn you will do the honor not to mention"; at the left: "It was decided yesterday, and even before, that you were not to write for me any more." On another spot he writes: "correct your blunders that occur through your fatuity, presumption, ignorance and foolishness." (Unwissenheit, Uebermuth, Eigenduenkel, und Dummheit). "That will become you better than to try ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... "Martial, your fatuity cries out for a lesson. What! you, a civilian, and so lucky as to be the husband-designate of Madame de Vaudremont, a widow of two-and-twenty, burdened with four thousand napoleons a year—a woman who slips such ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... leisure to think for themselves, and that they often lack the intelligent ability to foresee the difficulties and dangers menacing their country's welfare;—but that they are always ready, with the strangest fatuity, patience, and good-nature, to take their wives and families to see any new variation of a world's 'Punch and Judy' play, particularly if there is a savour of Royalty about it, accompanied by a brass band, well-equipped soldiers, and gilded coaches. ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Within a month he had the impertinent fatuity to lay before his superior a paper suggesting the policy, and moving that the President might commit to him, the secretary, the carrying out of that policy! With gentle courtesy—says General Viele—Lincoln took the paper from the author ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... made up of the admiration of the fools, the approbation of the knaves, and the concert of all interested vanities. When they pass, their horses at full trot, their carriage raising a cloud of dust, insolent, impudent, swelled with the vulgar fatuity of wealth, people bow to the ground, and say, 'Those are smart fellows!' And in fact, yes, by skill or luck, they have hitherto avoided the police-courts where so many others have come to grief. Those who despise them fear them, and shake hands with them. Moreover, they are rich enough ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... actual worth.) Long before the building was complete the owner was beset by "touts" and "cappers" of the insurance game, who poured into his ears the most ingenious expositions of the advantages of betting that it would burn down—for with incredible fatuity the people of that time continued, generation after generation, to build inflammable habitations. The persons whom the capper represented—they called themselves an "insurance company"—stood ready to accept the bet, a fact which seems ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... differentiating it from the emotion felt in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... criminal, dangerous, and fatal; and if it be possible to devise means of freeing ourselves from it, we ought at once to set about the employing of those means. It would be the most wretched and imbecile fatuity, to shut our eyes to the impending dangers and horrors, and "drive darkling down the current of our fate," till we are overwhelmed in the final destruction. If we are tyrants, cruel, unjust, oppressive, let us humble ourselves and repent in the sight ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... in his brilliant verses entitled "Gentlemen, Please Desist", exposes in a masterly way the fatuity of our loud-mouthed peace workers. Miss Silverman's lines on the same subject are very good, but scarcely equal in keenness of wit. It is all very well to "keep industry booming", but industry cannot ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments. Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a dozen times. And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... England, which, if they could not restore the dead, served at least to renovate the living; and Schomberg was ready to take the field early in the year 1690, notwithstanding the loss of about 10,000 men. James, with the constitutional fatuity of the Stuarts, had lost his opportunity. If he had attacked the motley army of the revolutionary party while the men were suffering from want and disease, and while his own troops were fresh and courageous, he might have conquered; ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... would have become developed in her to perfection if its growth had not been interrupted by the ill-humour she possessed; which it must be admitted the life she led was more than enough to give her. She felt her talent and her strength, but did not feel the fatuity and pride which weakened them and rendered them ridiculous. The current of her life was simple, smooth, with a natural gaiety even, which sparkled through the eternal restraint of her existence; and despite the ill- temper and the sharpness which this restraint without ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... Jack hurriedly, miscomprehending the emphasis with masculine fatuity,—"except the dying man for whom she lived and sacrificed her whole life. She gave me this ring, to always remind me of my trust. I suppose," he added ruefully, looking down upon it, "it's no use now. I'd better take ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... author has written here the biography of his book he has not acted on the prompting of fatuity. He relates facts which may furnish material for the history of human thought, and will without doubt explain the work itself. It may perhaps be important to certain anatomists of thought to be told that the soul is feminine. Thus although the author made a resolution not to think about the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... thus filling all the courts of Europe with his clamor against Count Neuperg, declaring that he had exceeded his powers and that he deserved to be hung, he at the same time, with almost idiotic fatuity, sent the same Count Neuperg back to the Turkish camp to settle some items which yet required adjustment. This proved, to every mind, the insincerity of Charles. The Russians, thus forsaken by Austria, also made peace with the Turks. They consented to demolish their fortress of Azof, to relinquish ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... in.' A hundred posters were required within an hour. He had nearly refused the order, in his feverish fatigue and his disgust, but some remnant of sagacity had asserted itself in him and saved him from this fatuity. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... melancholy lost creature, who was past all worldly help or hope. Never mind, I must cast about for some new scheme of life; and the repayment of Harry's debt to me at this juncture enabled me to live at least for some months even, or years to come. O strange fatuity of youth! I often say. How was it that we dared to be so poor ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... attempted to take in their country's service had been thwarted by faction, in spite of those benign promises of assistance made to them only a few weeks since by their opponents; and the gods answered by asserting that they were driven to this opposition by the Boeotian fatuity of the giants. They had no doubt promised their aid, and were ready to give it to measures that were decently prudent; but not to a bill enabling Government at its will to pension aged bishops! No; there ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... which, however, by some mistake, sailed without them, and the wind detained the vessel which was ordered to carry the rest. Hence came General Burgoyne's defeat, the French declaration, and the loss of thirteen colonies." What, indeed, could have been, even a priori, greater fatuity than to entrust the direction of a war to a man who years before, on the continent of Europe, had over and over again proved himself to be utterly destitute of every military quality—of whose general repute the following lines, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... unites his vision with that of his humans. Consider the decomposition of the moral life of Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer—a book which has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further than in The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... length, their numbers and persistent fury prevailed, their only prize was some twenty Huron warriors, spent with fatigue and faint with loss of blood. The rest lay dead around the shattered palisades which they had so valiantly defended. Fatuity, not cowardice, was the ruin of the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... fast passing away. The white man having asserted his superiority in the matters of assassination and robbery, has settled down upon a barrel of dynamite, as he did in the days of slavery, and will await the explosion with the same fatuity and self-satisfaction true of him in other days. But as convulsions from within are more violent and destructive than convulsions from without, being more deepseated and therefore more difficult to reach, the next explosion will be more disastrous, more far-reaching in its havoc than the one ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... old simpleton! It's not his fault, after all, that he fancies himself a great little man. How are you to judge of the stature of mankind when men have forever addressed you on their knees? Peace and joy to his innocent fatuity! He believes himself the most rational of men; in fact, he's the most superstitious. He fancies himself a philosopher, an inquirer, a discoverer. He has not yet discovered that he is a humbug, that Theodore is a prig, and that I am an adventurer. He prides himself on his good manners, his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... that at moments he felt as uncomfortable as a dreaming man who knows that he is asleep. And yet, he looked round at the fair reality about him with a confidence to which envious minds might have given the name of fatuity. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Comte's work from the start appealed to her. James Martineau had such a bristling personality—being very much like his sister Harriet—that when this sister wrote a review of a volume of his sermons, showing the fatuity and foolishness of the reasoning, and calling attention to much bad grammar, the good man cut her off with a shilling—"which he will have to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... house-pastimes.' 'I will not,' he says, 'agree in forbidding cards, dice, and other like games of Hazard,' and enters into an argument for his opinion, which is scarcely worth quoting. See Basilicon Doron—a prodigy of royal fatuity—but the perfect 'exponent' of the characteristics of the Stuart royal ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... returned to Cloisterham, and, taking Neville Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor. Mr. Jasper was sent for, the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was detained, and the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose against him. He was of that vindictive and violent nature, that but for his poor sister, who alone had influence over him, and out of whose sight he was never to be trusted, he would be in the daily commission of murder. Before coming to England ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... fatuity common in all strong temptations, "I'll spend a few more hours with this rare Undine, this genuine woman, who—infinitely more beautiful than Venus—is rising out of the dark waters of sorrow, shame, and despair, and then if I find that it will be wiser and safer to be only a somewhat unobtrusive ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... when required. While thus prepared, in 1842 my excellent and highly accomplished friend was most unexpectedly assailed by an afflicting malady, which at once reduced a brilliant mind to a distressing fatuity, which—after two lingering years—closed his valuable life, and ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... was common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries up to the time of Louis XIV.; but it is said that there were such men at the Court of Louis le Debonnaire. Giraldus Cambrenses writes that when he was preaching for the Crusades in South Wales, one John Spang "who by simulating fatuity, and having a quick tongue was wont to be a great comfort to the court," said to Resus, the king: "You should be greatly indebted to your relative the Archdeacon for sending a hundred of your men to day to follow Christ, and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypotheses about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... themselves. Some of the Bible defences thrown around slavery by ministers of the Gospel, do so torture common sense, Scripture, and historical fact, that it were hard to tell whether absurdity, fatuity, ignorance, or blasphemy, predominates, in compound. Each strives so lustily for the mastery, it may be set ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... intrigue then twenty-four hours old? 'Madame, quand une fois j'embrasse un parti, je suis capable des plus grandes sacrifices pour le soutenir.' The object of that heroic constancy was the Marechale de Villars, one of the loveliest women in France. It was the sublime of fatuity—was it not?" ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... retorted that he considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when he ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... unsatisfactory as myself; but they will serve to make the extracts I am to give a little more intelligible to the reader who does not recur to the whole poem. Parini was not one to break a butterfly upon a wheel; he felt the fatuity of heavily moralizing upon his material; the only way was to treat it with affected gravity, and to use his hero with the respect which best mocks absurdity. One of his arts is to contrast the deeds of his hero with those of his forefathers, of which he is so proud,—of course ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... his pretending never to have heard of a case so famous! Never to have heard this story of his most intimate friend! And then his notorious poverty! Old Caldigate would of course be able to buy such a man. And then Sir John's fatuity as to Bagwax! He could hardly bring himself to believe that Sir John was quite in earnest. But he was well aware that Sir John would know,—no one better,—by what arguments such a verdict as had been given might be practically set aside. The verdict would remain. But a pardon, if a pardon could ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... broke forth every shutter was flung wide to the pouring sunlight, and every window full of flowers and laughing children. Then instantly and without warning the house was blank, lifeless, and shuttered once more, leaving you helplessly apologetic that you had ever been guilty of the fatuity of associating anything but death and gloom with ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... and the glory and the insidious danger of that intoxicating war-cry; for the blindness and the wickedness and the selfish greed that lurk behind it, exploiting the generous emotions of the young and brave; for the irony and bitter fatuity of any war-cry in a world that should ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the costume of this singular visitor. There was, at times, in the expression of his eye, an indescribable mixture of imbecility and enthusiasm, as though the spirit of some Eastern fakir had reanimated a living body. A gleam of almost supernatural intelligence was mingled with an expression of fatuity, that in less enlightened ages would have invested him with the dangerous reputation of priest or prophet in the eyes of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... was pacing the room, expressing, by certain nods of his head, his opinion of the utter fatuity of his father-in-law. ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... Consul's preference of him. But I am far from concurring in what has been asserted by many persons, that France lost Egypt at the very moment when it seemed most easy of preservation. Egypt was conquered by a genius of vast intelligence, great capacity, and profound military science. Fatuity, stupidity, and incapacity lost it. What was the result of that memorable expedition? The destruction of one of our finest armies; the loss of some of our best generals; the annihilation of our navy; the surrender of Malta; and the sovereignty of England in the Mediterranean. What is the result ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... With even greater fatuity came the determination to publish the prophet's "revelations" in the form of the "Book of Commandments." Of the effect of this publication David Whitmer says, "The main reason why the printing press [at Independence] was destroyed, was because they published the 'Book of Commandments.' ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... guarded more closely than ever, the Duke of Norfolk was arrested; yet Philip, whose share in the conspiracy had remained a secret, was not discouraged by the absolute explosion of the whole affair. He still held to an impossible purpose with a tenacity which resembled fatuity. He avowed that his obligations in the sight of God were so strict that he was still determined to proceed in the sacred cause. He remitted, therefore, the promised funds to the Duke of Alva, and urged him to act with proper ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece into freshness of fatuity, he would not always smile so complacently in the thoughts of the little learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate sphere. And if every man, who has the interest of Art and of History at heart, would at once devote himself earnestly—not to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... His words, his prayers, his threats for Polyeucte plead, His tongue says, 'Listen, or be lost indeed!' Unskilled the fowler who his snare reveals: If at the bait I snatch—my doom is sealed: Too plain, too coarse, this web for any fly— Shall I this spider hail in my fatuity? His wrath is wrath arranged, his generous fire is nursed, That I, at Decius' hand, may meet the doom accurst, If I should pardon grant—that grace my crime would be, For he the spoil would reap of ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... he was hard by the capital, which he would have to reach if he was ever to mount the throne of his fathers. He had a devoted army with him—it would seem as if he had only to advance and to win—and yet, with a fatuity which makes the student of history gasp, he actually resolved to retreat, and did retreat. It is true, and must not be forgotten, that Charles did not know, and could not know, all his advantages; that many of the most urgent arguments for advance ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... have been raised against me, is not the business of this letter. Indeed it is a warfare I know not how to wage. The powers of positive vice I can in some degree calculate, and against direct malevolence I can be on my guard; but who can estimate the fatuity of giddy caprice, or ward off the unthinking mischief of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... could scarcely be any hope of checking, until this central point of the mutiny had fallen before the British arms. A position more dispiriting can scarcely be imagined; and to all these causes for despondency were added the incompetency and fatuity of the Indian government, and the procrastination of the home government in the forwarding of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... most kinds of composition. Fancy teaching a boy side by side with the elements of German or French to compose German and French verse, heroic, Alexandrine, or lyrical! The idea has only to be stated to show its fatuity. I would teach boys to write Latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish all Latin verse composition, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lies in the fact that this contest with Irus is sent before the main conflict as a prototype and a warning. The Suitors looked on and saw the miserable beggar completely undone; "they threw up their hands and nearly died laughing;" a case of blind fatuity, for they were soon to be in the place of Irus, every one of them. A little later Telemachus suggests the connection: "Would that the Suitors might droop their heads overcome in our house, as now Irus sits at the hall gate with drooping head like a drunken man, and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Hill confidently, "is systematic knowledge. Ideas that don't come into the system—must anyhow—be loose ideas." He was not quite sure whether that was a clever saying or a fatuity until ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt, of youth and fatuity in the passage; one feels how much the vague sonorous phrases have pleased the writer's immature literary sense; but there is something else too—there is a breath of that same speculative passion which burns in the Journal, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they did their duty by the rest of us, but the most egregious among us, the Deputy-Commissioner for selection, could see that he hardly counted. I thought I understood, but that may have been my fatuity; certainly when their husbands inquired what on earth they had been talking of, it usually transpired that they had found an infinite amount to say about nothing. It was a little worrying to hear Colonel Chichele and Major Harbottle describe their wives as 'pals,' but the fact ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... off—they're not getting off. When I see them—and I saw them this morning—they have showy reasons. They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl brought out: "They've postponed it for you." He protested so far as a man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind. She wants not to miss you—though she wants also not to show she wants you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have hung back ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... would not be always of one particular sort of effects. But they are of one particular sort, and hence there must be some antecedent to account for this uniformity in their nature, and they could not have been brought forth by nonentity! Surely if anything can equal the fatuity of the hypothesis that nonentity can bring forth, or that a thing can produce itself, it is a serious attempt to refute it. How often, while poring over the works of necessitarians, are we lost in amazement at the logical mania which seems to have seized them, and which, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Forces in England and America" observed that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom because there were the children to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the end of the book, he complained that all the babies were being had by the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible to ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... protested; but the reasons why she could not, seemed to have escaped her, or to have turned into mere excuses. In fact, since Charmian had proposed it, and seemed to wish it, they were really no longer reasons. Cornelia alleged them again with a sense of their fatuity. She did not finally assent; she did not finally refuse; but she felt that she ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... more violent, and his mental powers declined, till, 1741, it was found necessary that legal guardians should be appointed of his person and fortune. He now lost distinction. His madness was compounded of rage and fatuity. The last face that he knew was that of Mrs. Whiteway; and her he ceased to know in a little time. His meat was brought him cut into mouthfuls; but he would never touch it while the servant staid, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... in the early sunshine, marvelling, as people who accidentally find themselves up early pharisaically do, at the fatuity of those who waste the best hours of the whole day in bed, and revelling in the near prospect of a bath and my breakfast, when on turning a corner I walked into a hand-cart which was standing across the pavement. It contained workmen's tools—picks, shovels, and the ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... there is! Listen! The long impunity enjoyed by this desperado has made him daring to fatuity. Why, I was within a hair's breadth of capturing him myself a ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... a curious instance of the fatuity of contemporaries, that Hamilton's enemies reckoned upon a sullen silence, in the face of damning assault, from the greatest fighter of his time. Indubitably, they argued that he would think it best to pass the matter over; no man could be expected to give to the public the full explanation. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the dark, and solemn, and fanatical Dr. Grimshaw, her destined bridegroom, who really and truly loved the child to fatuity, and conscientiously did the very best he could for her mental and moral welfare, according to his light. Alas! "when the light that is in one is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Jacquelina rewarded ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... maiden, the orphan daughter of a noble Polygon, whose affection in former days he had sought in vain; and by a series of deceptions—aided, on the one side, by a string of lucky accidents too long to relate, and, on the other, by an almost inconceivable fatuity and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the bride—he succeeded in consummating the marriage. The unhappy girl committed suicide on discovering the fraud to ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... daughter of the King; and "the Prince de Conti," in speaking of Monsieur her brother-in-law! As for the chief nobles of the Court, it was rare for him to give them the Monsieur or the Mons. It was Marechal d'Humieres, and so on with the others. Fatuity and insolence were united in him, and by dint of mounting a hundred staircases a day, and bowing and scraping everywhere, he had gained the ear of I know not how many people. His wife was a tall creature, as impertinent as he, who wore ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... this record to explain the popularity, running at times into hero-worship and at times into drawing-room fatuity, which makes Stevenson and his work a fair subject for study. It is not impossible that a man who met certain needs of the times so fully, and whom large classes of people sprang forward to welcome, may in some particulars give ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... reference to Lord Brittleback. I think that he was wrong, and I said so all through. But, heavens on earth—!" and instead of completing his speech Harold Smith turned away his head, and struck his hands together in token of his astonishment at the fatuity of the age. What he probably meant to express was this: that if such a good deed as that late appointment made at the Petty Bag Office were not held sufficient to atone for that other evil deed to which he had ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... possible; but that Sterne's master was "very much hurt" at the boy's having been justly punished for an act of wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege of nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been a delusion of the humourist's later years. The extreme fatuity which it would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else. On the whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... strength, the personal superiority which had belonged to the men of Jena and Austerlitz, when in fact the French regiments of conscripts had ceased to be a match for equal numbers of the enemy. But no experience could alter Napoleon's fixed belief in the fatuity of all warfare except his own. After the havoc of Borodino, after the even struggles of Luetzen and Bautzen, he still reasoned as if he had before him the armies of Brunswick and Mack. His plan assumed the certainty of success in each of its parts; ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... humiliation and anguish which every woman suffers, when the man whom she loves shows her that she fills only a subordinate and insignificant place in his affection; and yet, while her nobler nature commanded his homage, and the brilliancy of the alliance seems to jeer at his blind fatuity, his heart throbbed and yearned with an intolerable longing for one upon whom the world had set the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and every church I have glanced into on my walks hereabouts has given me an almost pitying sense of it. One finds one's self at last—without fatuity, I hope— feeling sorry for the solitude of the remaining faithful. It's as if the churches had been made so for the world, in its social sense, and the world had so irrevocably moved away. They are ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... now I made too gross a use—the whole thing was quiet. In the house was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-room was—by which I meant must be—a lady, a charming English lady. There was, it seemed to me, no fatuity in believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not please her to be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... was commotion which soon ended in a long and bitter war. Even this need not have materially disturbed the family had not Kingsburgh precipitated himself into the conflict, needlessly and recklessly. With blind fatuity he took the wrong side in the controversy; and even then by the exercise of patience might have overcome the effects of his folly. Before Flora and her family were settled in America the storm gave its ominous rumble. When Governor Martin, who had deserted his post and fled to an armed ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... is about to receive a second object-lesson upon the fatuity of trusting to individuals. Confident in Caesar's ability to take the ball at least within kicking distance of the base, they have rushed forward, leaving unguarded their own citadel. Caesar, going too fast, misjudges the distance between himself and the back. A second later the ball is ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... seized; that at Vienna, as well as at Berlin, I should be reclaimed; and that I could not make the least preparation for departure without his being informed of it; for he knew, he said, every thing that passed in my house. In that respect he was a boaster, and, as the event has proved, exhibited mere fatuity in matters of espionnage. But who would not have been terrified at the tone of assurance with which he told all my friends that I could not move a step without ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... been ever so well disposed towards being made technically an honest woman by her betrayer of auld lang syne, this declaration of his motives might easily have hardened her heart against him. What fatuity of affection could have survived it? Yet his candour was probably his only redeeming feature. He was scarcely an invariable hypocrite; he was merely heartless, sensual, and cruel to the full extent of man's possibilities. Nevertheless, he could and would have lied black white ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... presented by the representatives of Probinus, puts a somewhat different face upon the matter, and seems to show that the sale by Agapeta (notwithstanding her melancholy condition of fatuity and vice) was a bona fide one, for ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... force and significance of the defendant's signals. I am aware that my voice is singularly deficient in producing either the dulcet tones of my fair client or the impassioned vehemence of the defendant's response. I will," continued the Colonel, with a fatigued but blind fatuity that ignored the hurriedly knit brows and warning eyes of the Judge, "try again. The note uttered by my client" (lowering his voice to the faintest of falsettos) "was 'Keeree;' the response was 'Keerow-ow.'" And the Colonel's voice fairly ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... and children, not cursed with the fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society, must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of talent have had part in the uproarious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... acute than those who see. Persons born without hands have been known to acquire a power of using their feet for a number of the principal offices usually served by that member. I need hardly say how remarkably fatuity is compensated by the more than usual regard paid to the children born with it by their parents, and the zeal which others usually feel to protect and succour such persons. In short, we never see evil of any kind take place where there is not some remedy or compensating principle ready ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... useless slaughter of Fredericksburg. With the fatuity that characterized the earlier years of the war, the heroic army of the Potomac, which might have annihilated Lee on previous occasions, was hurled against heights and fortifications that, from the beginning, rendered the ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... is in the graver part elegant and easy, and in some of the lighter scenes exquisitely humorous. Ague—cheek is drawn with great propriety, but his character is, in a great measure, that of natural fatuity, and is therefore not the proper prey of a satirist. The soliloquy of Malvolio is truly comic; he is betrayed to ridicule merely by his pride. The marriage of Olivia, and the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contrived to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and fails to produce ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... Buffeted by Fate, sometimes starving, always thirsty, he never complains; and there is all through his autobiography what we might call an "Ah, well!" attitude about his outlook on life. Because of this, and because his very fatuity makes us smile, I feel that he deserves forgiveness and even ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... cover a multitude of sins. The only drawback to her perfect content in these early days was the presence of her uncle Charles, whom she could not bear, and who, for his part, looked upon her as a mere encumbrance, and her being with them at all as a piece of fatuity on the part of his brother-in-law. There were constant skirmishes between them while they were together; but even these ceased after a time, for Moore, who, ever since his sister's marriage, had clung fitfully to M. Linders, as a luckier and more prosperous man than himself, was accustomed ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... poor girl must have been! And even if she could have been so inappropriately gowned on shipboard, she had plenty of time to put on a warm and suitable tailor-made gown before she was shipwrecked. This is sheer fatuity, for any one with Mr. Tracy's abundant ingenuity could easily have contrived ruin for the tailored gown in time for Iris to assume masculine garb and participate bravely in that fearful fight on ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... different sides of the man are hard to reconcile. Now he seemed frank and honest; again subtle and insincere. As an active politician in the narrow sense, he should have been sagacious and astute, yet he displayed at the crisis of his life the most absolute fatuity. At times he had a buoyant and puerile way of disregarding fact and enveloping himself in a world of his own imagining. He could bluster, when he wished, like any demagogue; and yet he could be persuasive, agreeable, ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... of course, a calamitous folly. From the very first, from the moment when the commercial traveller had with incomparable rash fatuity thrown the paper pellet over the counter, Sophia's awakening commonsense had told her that in yielding to her instinct she was sowing misery and shame for herself; but she had gone on, as if under a spell. It had needed the irretrievableness of flight ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... It enables us at any time to gauge the progress of enlightenment, to ascertain what real gain has been made, what is delusive, and what remains to be done that it is possible to do; for we must not expect the record of human fatuity to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... door, the adventurer surprised Prince Victor, morosely ambling by, in his vast fatuity no doubt imagining that his passage through Halfmoon Street would go unremarked in the dusk of that early winter evening. He wasn't at all pleased to find himself mistaken; and though Lanyard did his best with his blandest smile ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... of poetical correspondence about Mazzini and Rossi. Rossi was also an exile for liberal principles, but he did not value his birthright; he alienated it, and as a French citizen became peer of France and representative of Louis Philippe in Italy. When, with the fatuity of those whom the gods have doomed to perish, Pius IX. took the representative of the fallen Guizot policy for his minister, he made him a Roman citizen. He was proclaimed such on the 14th of November. On ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... a modern railway station, as of old at the city gates, the fatuity of human aspirations may be studied advantageously. Soldiers were there, at Victoria, hundreds of them, lined up on a distant platform, and they symbolised the spirit of an age which exalts Mechanism to the pinnacle of a deity and which offers itself ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... really meaning what it says, is worth a little talk: the Heroism and Patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the breasts of Nature; and already poisoned by O'Connellism and the Old Irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one knows not what. Very sad to see. On the whole, no man ought, for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with lies; but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is the meaning of a tongue, people used to know!—Ireland ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard. We can well believe what we hear ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... character. Shakespeare is no longer an ideal to us; no single man can now fill our mental horizon; we can see around and above the greatest of the past: the overman of to-day is only on the next round of the ladder, and our children will smile at the fatuity of his conceit. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... adopting his quackery. This dishonesty led them into difficulties. To hide that their whole practice in medicine was reversed on better information, they went from shuffle to shuffle, till at last they reached this climax of fatuity and egotism—THE TYPE ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Furthermore, it keeps him from home, while I have to stay at home and be entertained by my sons, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightly calls dull and fatuous. In other words, club life for him, and dulness and fatuity for me." ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... to hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated by ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Gontran, Gontran! Gontran or the convent, and the most rigorous one of all, the Carmel, in sackcloth and ashes! Oh, Aunt Louise, do look at him! He listens to all this with an unbearable little air of fatuity." ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... rate to find a wife for. I'm neither fish nor flesh. I've no country, no career, no future; I offer nothing; I bring nothing. What position under the sun do I confer? There's a fatuity in our talking as if we could make grand terms. You and the others are well enough: qui prend mari prend pays, and you've names about which your husbands take a great stand. But papa and I—I ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... in the future was certain,—Nathan Griggs should not escape altogether scathless. For a long time Birt sat motionless, revolving vengeful purposes in his mind. Every moment he grew more bitter, as he reflected upon his wrecked scheme, his wonderful fatuity, and the double dealing of his chosen coadjutor. But he would get even with Nate Griggs yet; he promised himself ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... boarding us was fearfully multiplied by having thus to cross the storm instead of breasting it. Useless and helpless, and only in the way, and battered about by wind and sea, so that my Sunday dress was become a drag, what folly, what fatuity, what frenzy, I might call it, could ever have led me to jump into that boat? "I don't know. I only know that I always do it," said my sensible self to its mad sister, as they both shut their eyes at a great white wave. "If I possibly survive, I will ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... thought that grief might gar her quit, Her only son was lost at sea; But aff her wits behuved to flit An' leave her in fatuity. She threeps, an' threeps he 's livin' yet For a' the tellin' she can get; But catch the doited wife forget To ca' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... alluring and yet illusive of all the phenomena presented by civilization is that which we have been considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest prescience when advancing along the curve which has led it to ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... complete the ruin of their country. They might do it in six months; yes, he would venture to say, or even in three months; but he gave them at most a year. Favourable accidents, against which even the blind fatuity and garrulous pig-headedness of septuagenarian senility could not prevail might prolong the struggle; but the day of doom was inevitable, unless—and so on, and so on, with a running commentary by ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Foyle apparently, instead of in the Bay of Larne or Belfast? In such circumstances, of what use is it for critics any longer to go on squabbling over Gaelic editions, collecting and collating mediaeval Gaelic ballads, and asserting with hopeless fatuity that he was the author of these poems, or that he stole them from the Irish? The Irish themselves are as ignorant of the subject as he is; and yet in spite of all this ignorance on his part and ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... tips, but they were liked; they didn't do anything themselves, but they were welcome. They looked so well everywhere; they gratified the general relish for stature, complexion and "form." They knew it without fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected themselves in consequence. They weren't superficial: they were thorough and kept themselves up—it had been their line. People with such a taste for activity had to have some line. I could feel how even in a dull house they could ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... consolation the young patriot found in the contemptuous reply his Government made to his solemn warnings was the almost equal fatuity with which the Southern people were now approaching their first ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... accustomed society or amusements. No interest is taken in the concerns of others—no love, no sympathy remain: even natural affection to nearest relatives is gradually extinguished, and the moral sense obliterated. The wretched victims of a fatal poison fall, at length, into a state of fatuity, and die with the powers both of body and mind wholly exhausted. Some, after repeated fits of derangement, expire in a sudden and violent phrenzy; some are hurried out the world by apoplexies; others perish by the slower process of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... in a fence admits to a long field on a hillside. The entrance is perilous, and before it is achieved may involve more than one headlong flight to the safe summit of a friendly wall, as the young horses protest, and whirl, and buck with the usual fatuity of their kind. Once within the fair field there befal the enticements of the green apple, of the dark-complexioned sweetmeat temptingly denominated "Peggy's leg," of the "crackers"—that is, a confection ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a degrading effort to plunder one another, men who are tired of hustle and strife. What, sir, would you call the phenomenon of to-day? What is the outstanding feature of modern life? The bankruptcy, the proven fatuity, of everything that is bound up under the name of Western civilization. Men are perceiving, I think, the baseness of mercantile and military ideals, the loftiness of those older ones. They will band together, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of contempt for women, all the phrases of mocking fatuity which I had repeated as a schoolboy his lesson, suddenly came to my mind; and strange to say, while formerly I did not believe in making a parade of them, now it seemed that they were real or at least ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... described them in his verse. Frequently he indulges in descriptions of sunrise and sunset; they leave no vivid impression, but charm the reader by their quiet beauty. It cannot be denied that his fondness for simple, homely images sometimes led him into sheer fatuity; and candid admirers must also admit that, despite his study of simplicity, he could not refrain from hunting (as the manner was) after far-fetched ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... previous to the siege of that fortress in the Franco-German war. He was now representing the New York Herald, and had just returned from Estella, at the taking of which place, the most important the Carlists had yet seized, he had the luck to be present. He assured me that it was utter fatuity to dream of following the Carlists, except I had at least one horse—but that it would be sensible to take two if I could manage to procure them. It was more than an ordinary man was qualified to cope with, to make his observations, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... His early fame, his important position, the delusive eulogies that the world sheds on artists as lightly as we say, "How d'ye do?" or discuss the weather, gave him that high sense of merit which degenerates into sheer fatuity when talent wanes. The Cross of the Legion of Honor was the crowning stamp of the great man ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... this spirit which in the decaying ripeness of the Bourbon dynasty drove the Louis from Paris to Versailles and from Versailles to Marly. Millions were wasted to build the vast monument of royal fatuity, and when it was done the Grand Monarque found it necessary to fly from time to time to the sham solitude and mock retirement he ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... fatuity, silliness, irrationality, insagacity; imprudence, indiscretion, unwisdom, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... he put off the beginning of sturdy self-denial until the morrow, and almost every day he poisoned his system with that which also poisoned and demoralized his soul. He dimly saw his danger, but did not realize it. With the fatuity of all self-indulgent natures he thought the day would come when, with better prospects and health renewed, he would throw away the spell which bound him and become a free man, but day after day passed and he did not; his appetite began to flag and his energy also; he would sit dreaming ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... want of thought.] Incogitancy. — N. incogitancy[obs3], vacancy, inunderstanding[obs3]; fatuity &c. 499; thoughtlessness &c. (inattention) 458; vacuity. couch potato, vegetable. V. not think &c. 451; not think of; dismiss from the mind, dismiss from the thoughts &c. 451. indulge in reverie &c. (be inattentive) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of the significance of our prayers; of their deep value to our spirit in constantly renewing the sense of dependence; and further, since we "surely find that our prayers are answered, what blindness and fatuity there is in neglect or ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields |
