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More "Fatuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expectation of anything wiser or better from her, until years and the consequences 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 ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... 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 ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... 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 the good sense of the king himself not less than of his friends. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... there was perhaps some hyperbole. But it was obvious from the stir of officialdom that the signer of the demand wanted his daughter very much and was accustomed to having his wants respectfully carried out. One feature of the message would have convinced the Tyro, had he seen it, of the fatuity of fatherhood. It described the ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Clarence's drawing-room, the conversation turned upon love. The ladies spoke of it with pride, delicacy, and mystery, the men with discretion and fatuity; everyone took an interest in the conversation, for each one was interested in what he or she said. A great deal of wit flowed; brilliant apostrophes were launched forth and keen repartees were returned. But when Professor Haddi began to speak he ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... 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 ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... takes the child into her arms, God makes her the love-magistrate of the family; and her instincts and moral nature fit her to adjudicate questions of weakness and want. And when society is on the eve of adjudicating such questions as these, it is a monstrous fatuity to exclude from them the very ones that, by nature, and training, and instinct, are best fitted to legislate ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... young fellow exceedingly attractive;—as a painter from the rare combination of such strength with such beauty, and as a man from a certain yet rarer clarity of nature which to the vulgar observer seems fatuity until he has to encounter it in action, when the contrast is like meeting a thunderbolt. Naturally the dishonest takes the honest for a fool. Beyond his understanding, he imagines him beneath it. But Lenorme, although so much more a man of ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... can cure himself by teaching his brain the habit of dwelling upon his extreme fatuity. Let him concentrate regularly, with intense fixation, upon the ideas: 'When I lose my temper, when I get ruffled, when that mysterious vibration runs through me, I am making a donkey of myself, a donkey, and a donkey! You understand, a preposterous donkey! ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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 to make ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the point was immaterial, but the omission would necessitate a little inquiry. To follow Dare on the chance of his having fixed upon the same quarters was a course which did not commend itself. He resolved to get some lunch before proceeding with his business—or fatuity—of discovering the elusive lady, and drove off to a neighbouring tavern, which did not happen to be, as he hoped it might, the one chosen by ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... here and there, in the meanwhile declaiming loudly against the unrighteousness of tariff barons. The McKinley administration has based its contracted currency solely upon the gold product. This the Democratic administration would have based, with almost equal fatuity, upon the silver product. McKinleyism and the Democracy with which the country has been cursed on two occasions since the war, are six of one and half a dozen of the other. Practically considered, the main difference between Republicanism and Democracy, is the difference between ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... height to height and her husband sped from depth to depth in the seas of human fatuity. Whenever he took a furlough he went, of course, straight to her, wheresoever she was, in Berlin, New York, or Paris. To Birnier the situation was ideal. He had never dreamed of any other woman. Indeed the tracts of his mind were so filled with ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... the 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. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... guarded against being forced to act in such a manner. And it is desirable to prove by definitions that this conduct of his ought not to be called imprudence, or accident, or necessity, but indolence, indifference, or fatuity. ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... gospel," but when he furiously 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 ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the smile 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 ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... 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 manufacture of this ware, that has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... honourable gentleman gave the Ministry another year to 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
... Crown. But, as 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 of idiots. ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... [Footnote 44: With a fatuity into which he occasionally fell, Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit remarks that his two plays are an illustration of that most Christian text, "Let him who is without sin among you cast ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... 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 Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... cause desperate, but 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 down a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... excusable.[201] Again, like his contemporaries, he shows a lack of taste and humour which in its worst manifestations passes belief. Not a few of the passages already quoted serve to illustrate the point. But for fatuity it would be hard to surpass the words with which Amphitryon interrupts Theseus' account of ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... 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 alluded, there would be an end of all justice in sublunary matters. Was no offence ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... us to New York together were not nearly so frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist across the table to write him a play about ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... had tormented Rose before with the abysmal fatuity of its phrases, its silly sloppy melody, and yet—this was the infuriating thing—the way it had of getting into her, somehow, reaching bare nerves and setting ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... teach you 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 ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... alive all the native energies of the human mind. The answers were little connected and unintelligible, sometimes seeming to exhibit the finest subtlety of savage cunning, and at others to possess the mental helplessness of appearing the most abject fatuity. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... The man turning up exactly at the moment! And such a man! And then 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 ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... 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 order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort of pedagogue ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... things we pass, in order to reach a point most superficially treated by Lieutenant Eyre, which was, in truth, the original fountain of the whole calamity. We have said already, that, (guilty as might be the leaders by unexampled fatuity, obstinacy, and improvidence,) in our judgement, the mischief ascended to elder sources than either General Elphinstone or Shelton. And here was the main source, which (on the principle explained above) we shall barely indicate, not saying one word ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... got it into their heads that to send round a lot of Sir Douglas Haig's troops (who were pretty well occupied as it was) to the Isonzo Front would be a capital plan, the idea being to catch the Central Powers no end of a "biff" in this particular quarter. That fairly banged Banagher. For sheer fatuity ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... psalters or missals; no declamation upon the boldness of Luther could impress thinking young men as did citations from his "Erfurt Sermon,'' which, by weakening his safe-conduct, put him virtually at the mercy of his enemies at the Diet of Worms; no statements as to the fatuity of Robespierre could equal citations from an original copy of his "Report on the Moral and Religious Considerations which Ought to Govern the Republic''; all specifications of the folly of Marat paled before the ravings in the original copies of his newspaper, "L'Ami du Peuple''; no ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 descent ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... 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 texts from the charming ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the examples of Mexico and Spanish South America, which had recently conquered with their blood their emancipation from monarchy. Liberal ideas were naturally diffused by Cubans who had traveled either in Europe or North America, there imbibing the spirit of modern civilization. But with a fatuity and obstinacy which has always characterized her, the mother country resolved to ignore all causes of discontent, and their significant influence as manifested by the people of the island. In place of yielding to the popular current and introducing a liberal and mild system of government, she drew ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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
... 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
... unprofitable servant was deep in his nature—as it may well be in all who are not either blinded by inborn fatuity, or condemned by natural poverty of mind to low and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... was, 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 ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... words, and he grew serious all at once, saying, "Cousin, I beg you will resist this folly which is taking such a powerful hold upon you. Let me tell you that your present conduct, as harmless as it now appears, may lead to the most terrible consequences. In your thoughtless fatuity you are standing on a thin crust of ice, which may break under you ere you are aware of it, and let you in with a plunge. I shall take good care not to hold you fast by the coat-tails, for I know you will scramble out again pretty quick, and then, when ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... concerning others who had spoken against loan-money, and what arguments they had used, this person was to be charged in his majesty's name, and upon his allegiance, not to disclose to any other the answer he had given. A striking instance of that fatuity of the human mind, when a weak government is trying to do what it knows not how to perform: it was seeking to obtain a secret purpose by the most open and general ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... outer spaces of her mind there grew, to save her, a sense of her crass fatuity. She was quickly in a carriage, eager to avoid any acquaintance, glad the driver was no village familiar who might amiably seek to regale her with gossip. They went swiftly up the western road through its greening elms to where Clytie kept the big house—her own home while she ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... where he had put the matches, and remembered there were some on the widow-sill. The room was so dark that he could not see the foot of the bed, and in his fatuity he had barricaded himself in the room with the loathsome reptile which was to ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... rabbit-faced youth, whose head was thatched with a shock of coarse black hair. He possessed a pair of spreading black eyebrows upon a forehead which was white when well washed, for Nature had done honestly by the top of his head, but had realised, when his chin was reached, the fatuity of spending more time upon the moulding and adornment of the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... station, and be ready for head-way 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 clued ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... promontory of the same name, on a rocky point at the mouth of Pemaquid River. It was a quadrangle, with ramparts of rough stone, built at great pains and cost, but exposed to artillery, and incapable of resisting heavy shot. The government of Massachusetts, with its usual military fatuity, had placed it in the keeping of an unfit commander, and permitted some of the yeoman garrison to bring their wives and children to this dangerous ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... preponderantly in the majority, but its mass was being constantly diminished as a little knowledge of danger seeped into its substance. News of the possible catastrophe passed from mouth to mouth; a world outside, waiting aghast at such fatuity, began to get in its messages. Street corner alarmists talked to such as would listen. Thousands upon thousands left the city. Hundreds of thousands more, tied hard and fast by the strings of necessity, waited in an hourly ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... broken 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 resembling dog biscuit sown ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... help,"—and then he explained to Hawkins that he looked to the booksellers for support, and was not inclined to place dependence on the promises of great men. "Thus did this idiot in the affairs of the world," adds Hawkins, with a fatuity that is quite remarkable in its way, "trifle with his fortunes, and put back the hand that was held out to assist him! Other offers of a like kind he either rejected or failed to improve, contenting himself with ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... 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 test ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Mrs. Quickley succeeds once more to entice the old fool. She orders him to another rendez-vous in the Park at midnight, and advises him to come in the disguise of Herne the black hunter. The others hear of the joke and all decide to punish him thoroughly for his fatuity. Ford, who has promised Dr. Cajus, to unite Anna to him the very night, tells him to wear a monk's garb, and also reveals to him, that Anna is to wear a white dress with roses. But his wife, overhearing this, frustrates his designs. She gives ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... must be quoted: Mirabeau, wishing to get rid of a mistress of whom he is tired, but who is still devoted to him, writes her a letter of the most studied insolence, cleverly turned, and sends a copy of it, with infinite fatuity, to his friend. Vauvenargues replies that he has read out this letter at dinner to his fellow-officers, who have been greatly diverted by its wit. "But," said Vauvenargues, "we are sorry" (that is to say, of course, Vauvenargues ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... of things is 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 ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... high-heeled shoe, balanced on their keels on the top of the water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and a flag at the top of every stick, form perhaps the purest exhibition of human inanity and fatuity which the arts have yet produced. The harbors also, in which these model navies ride, are worthy of all observation for the intensity of the false taste which, endeavoring to unite in them the characters of pleasure-ground and port, destroys the veracity ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... go altogether so ill, with men grown up to years of maturity. They do not for the most part answer a plain question in a manner to make you wonder at their fatuity. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... the 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 ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... daughter, I believe," said Mr Cox, with much moral seriousness in his tone. The archdeacon only sighed as each separate wail was uttered, and shook his head, signifying that the fatuity of some ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... 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 Siam as an ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... part of humanity, for certainly there have been few more pathetic situations; but that he really cared anything for the success of Spain is exceedingly doubtful. The Hohenzollern common sense in him must have been for years vexed at the folly and fatuity of Spanish policy. He probably inherits the feeling of his father, who, when visiting the late Spanish monarch some years before his death, showed a most kindly personal feeling toward Spain and its ruler, and an intense ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... brought them together was an agreement entered into some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that such a ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... person in a moment of fatuity made Granby a magistrate. Magistrates should learn to condense their wisdom into sentences. Granby beats out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... 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 to blame for the horrors of the reconstruction ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... 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
... body" were an 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she had considered him, as she had considered young Reggy Lawson, as she had considered Mr. Higginson, who was not so young. As for Reggy and his successor, she had done with them. All that could be known of their fatuity she knew. Perhaps they had never greatly interested her. But she was interested in Laurence Furnival. She told Straker that he was the most amusing man of her acquaintance. She was, Straker noticed, perpetually ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... 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
... returned the Doctor, with sublime fatuity, 'I read your thoughts! Nor am I surprised—your education is not yet complete; the higher duties of men have not been yet presented to you fully. A hint—till we have leisure—must suffice. Now that I am once ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Her good-natured laughter with the men who crowded about her familiarly was a kind of disloyalty. She seemed at times to be exchanging doubtful jests with them; and at last, to protect her from the results of her own fatuity, he danced with her himself—danced almost incessantly, notwithstanding the heat ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... against men of property. Think of his boastfulness when he claims by his embassy to have snatched Byzantium out of the hands of Philip, to have thrown the Acharnians into revolt, to have astonished the Thebans with his harangue! He thinks that you have reached the point of fatuity at which you can be made to believe even this—as if your citizen were the deity of persuasion instead of a pettifogging mortal! And when at the end of his speech, he calls as his advocates those who shared his bribes, imagine that you see upon this platform where I now speak before ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... by Italian critics, who find them as 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 the contrast ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... 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 of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... between your rose-leaf lips; to fight day-long in the reeking arena of bacon merchants; to settle accounts instead of merely incurring them; to be confined in Stygian city-blocks instead of silken bedchambers; to rise with the sparrow and leave by the early morning train. What fatuity! Some day, when woman has had her way and man has ceased to have his will, she will see of the travail of her soul and be bitterly dissatisfied; for, unless man is a greater fool than he looks, she shall demand back her ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... to say: his name, Gontran, 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
... of dramatic history has heard of Garrick's contest with Madam Clairon, and the triumph which the English Roscius achieved over the Siddons of the French stage, by his representation of the father struck with fatuity on beholding his only infant child dashed to pieces by leaping in its joy from his arms: perhaps the sole remaining conquest for histrionic tragedy is somewhere in the unexplored regions of the mind, below the ordinary understanding, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... has 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 pleasures of ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... books, either printed or manuscript. He compared the Gypsy words in the publication of Grellmann with various vocabularies, which had long been in existence, of the robber jargons of Spain and Italy, which jargons by a strange fatuity had ever been considered as belonging to the Gypsies. Finding that the Gypsy words of Grellmann did not at all correspond with the thieves' slang, he concluded that the Gypsies of Spain and Italy ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... lovingly 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) ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... play 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 ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... marvellous facility, but often with an infatuation, or even fatuity, equally marvellous. Specious and audacious generalization is, however, a vice of thinking more attractive to most than any virtue,—above all, if it flatter their wishes and opinions. There are few to appreciate an exquisite temperance, an exquisite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 enrich his own collection—not ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... herself in the cold stone hall with the great portraits and the lack of all modern frippery. It was so plainly a man's house, so clearly a place of tradition, that her pert modern speech seemed for one moment a fatuity. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage, while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin—a process which resulted in the entanglement of fingers of different sexes, and made Sister ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... profound regard, and being sort of a revolutionary by prenatal instincts, 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... gave me a shock of intense surprise. First, I could not conceive how the Catholic Church had got on for eighteen hundred years without my cooperation and ability; and, secondly, I could not understand what fatuity possessed the Bishop to appoint as his vicar-general a feeble old man of seventy, who preached with hesitation, and, it was whispered, believed the world was flat, and that people were only joking when ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... against him that most inglorious of all charges, an accusation of sentimental fatuity, of the disposition to invent obstacles to enjoyment so that he might have the pleasure of seeing a pretty girl attempt to remove them. But it must be admitted that if Bernard really thought at present that he had better leave Baden, the observation I have just quoted was not so much a ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... 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 ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... 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 it was the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... gauge Shelby's vogue with the groundlings as greater than before, and lamented it to Bernard Graves, who fell wholly into his mood for once and deplored the fatuity of popular judgment with ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto, it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... surrender—surrender so early, so immediate—should have to ensue. It was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged—it which was enough as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast drawing-room—the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the first as of prodigious extent—he awaited her, at her request, conveyed ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... the printed 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 any ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... down," and today even the lowliest incapable of all Nature's aborted has a nose that he dares to call his own and bite off at his own sweet will. Unfortunately, with an unthinkable fatuity we permit him to be told that but for the very agencies that have put him in possession he could successfully assert a God-given and world-old right to the noses of others. At present the honest fellow is mainly engaged in refreshing ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... them 'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say, of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had (as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had never been able to think about Christmas to an extent ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... pebble ridge. And the risk of a heavy sea 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 try to know better. But ever from my childhood ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... 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 that ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... have an idea that I shall see you swing round yet," Ransom remarked, in a tone in which it would have appeared to Henry Burrage, had he heard these words, that presumption was pushed to fatuity. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... that the inner and the outer qualities of a poet's work are of their very nature indivisible; that any criticism is of necessity worthless which looks to one side only, whether it be to the outer or to the inner quality of the work; that the fatuity of pedantic ignorance never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separate aesthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of demarcation, and to bring all critical work under one ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Morabita's voice remains to her," he continued. "Her absolute nullity minus it is disagreeable to think of. And much as I relish collecting telling examples of the fatuity of the Creator—she, voiceless, would offer a supreme one—I would spare her that, poor dear. For she was really rather charming ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... last moment he had never expected such an ending; he had been overbearing to the last degree, never dreaming that two destitute and defenceless women could escape from his control. This conviction was strengthened by his vanity and conceit, a conceit to the point of fatuity. Pyotr Petrovitch, who had made his way up from insignificance, was morbidly given to self-admiration, had the highest opinion of his intelligence and capacities, and sometimes even gloated in solitude over his image in the glass. But what he loved and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hope of it. It is a case of confirmed fatuity I believe. If you like to see him again, you shall accompany me to-morrow when I visit him. What a strange life is this, Stukely! What a strange history may be that of this poor fellow whom Providence has cast at our door! Well, poor wretch, we'll do the best we can for him. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... is so easy, so natural, and so necessary, that it looks like fatuity to neglect the golden months of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... far more plausibly be assigned to Middleton's than to Fletcher's. Had it or could it have been the work of Fletcher, the clamorous and multitudinous satellites who preferred him with such furious fatuity of acclamation to so inconsiderable a rival as Shakespeare would hardly have abstained from reclaiming it on behalf of the great poet whom it pleased their imbecility to set so far above one so ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidences of our wisdom. We are so self-satisfied with our own customs, that we hold up our hands with surprise at the fatuity of men who presume to point out to us their defects. Those practices in which we most widely depart from the broad and recognised morality of all civilised ages and countries are to us the Palladiums of our jurisprudence. Modes of proceeding which, if now first proposed to us, would ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... his model the art of varying his pausation, and the period closes his second line with the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect, noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is made to profess the errors satirised, and to be the unabashed mouthpiece of his own fatuity, "Mine," ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... 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 ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... 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 in size out of all modern proportion to the local needs, and the only thing ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... lay the weak point in his plan of campaign. With the fatuity incidental on occasions to even the shrewdest minds, he had not counted upon independence in the host which he believed slave to him, in thought and word and deed. He rated himself the dictator, the prompter without whose suggestion no one of all the players in this gigantic ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... she did not care a chip, seeing the tailor's son was possessed of untold wealth. Now when one member of a household is making a struggle for a family, it is painful to see the benefit of that struggle negatived by the folly of another member. The future Mrs Moffat did feel aggrieved by the fatuity of the young heir, and, consequently, took upon herself to look as much like her Aunt de Courcy as ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... New York to Georgia was exposed to the merciless fury of the savages. In no instance were the measures of defence adopted by the different colonies, adequate to their object.—From some unaccountable fatuity in those who had the direction of this matter, a defensive war, which alone could have checked aggression and prevented the effusion of blood, was delayed 'till the whole population, of the country west of the Blue ridge, had retired east of those mountains; ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Julia had 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 with a purpose. He ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... parricide,' replied Varus, 'not content with killing himself with his vices, and his father by connivance, must needs destroy his country by his fatuity. I confess, that till that order be repealed, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... maternal ancestor, a Faulkner, of course valued beyond its worth as a readable volume; and I might name many other instances; but to esteem a book chiefly because it has never been cut open, did strike my ignorance as an abnormal fatuity. Curzon was one of our ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... but nothing is now known as to its 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 ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... for the First 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... half an hour to recover my quiet mind. After all, it is as idle to rage against man's fatuity as to hope that he will ever be less a fool. For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle. Why, I have known the day when it would have been beyond my power altogether, or else would have cost me a meal. Wherefore, let me again ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Philip fancied, with that fatuity common to his sex, that he had worn an impenetrable mask in regard to his wild passion for Evelyn, and did not dream that, all along, Celia had read him like an open book. She judged Philip quite accurately. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... character 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, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the generosity of Dr. Groschen in transferring his splendid collections of Greek inscriptions to the FitzTaylor Museum, I rejoiced; the next grant would be devoted to science, in consideration of the recently enriched galleries of the art and archaeological section. I only pitied the fatuity of the authorities for being grateful. Dr. Groschen now wound himself into everybody's good wishes, and the University degree was already conferred. He was offered a fine set of rooms in a college famous for culture. He became a well-known figure on the Q.P. But ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... all atheists. For at bottom, atheism is either a fad or a trade or a fatuity. And whether the one or the other, it is a sham more pernicious than the worst. To the young mind, it is a shibboleth of cheap culture; to the shrewd and calculating mind, to such orators as Khalid heard, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... gall, downright gall! Well, I didn't find it wormwood, and replied, with my untutored Redhorse heart in my throat, "I—I shall be pleased to do anything." Could words have been more stupid? There are depths of fatuity in me, friend o' my soul, that ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Manor 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 ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Quickley succeeds once more to entice the old fool. She orders him to another rendez-vous in the Park at midnight, and advises him to come in the disguise of Herne the black hunter. The others hear of the joke and all decide to punish him thoroughly for his fatuity. Ford, who has promised Dr. Cajus, to unite Anna to him the very night, tells him to wear a monk's garb, and also reveals to him, that Anna is to wear a white dress with roses. But his wife, overhearing this, frustrates his designs. She gives a black monk's garb to Fenton, while Anna chooses ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... admirable vent for gunpowder and its profitable sale; and since the savages must always be killing, it was manifestly best for all concerned that they should kill each other. He could not sufficiently deride the happy illustration which Governor Glen had given them (in his fatuity, Varney thought) of the values of peace and concord. In the presence of the two delegations the mediating Governor had taken an arrow and shown them with what ease it could be broken; then how impossible he found it to break a quiverful of arrows, thus ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... criminal class. It is also made up of the spirited—but the spirited who, having little shrewdness and no calculation—that is, no ability to foresee and measure consequences—wage clumsy war upon society and pay the penalty of their fatuity in lives of wretchedness even more wretched than the common lot. Gideon belonged to the second class—the class that pushes upward without getting into jail; he was a fair representative of this type, neither its best nor its worst, but about midway of its range between arrogant, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of the fatuity and recklessness and inconsistency of popular verdicts are wholesome enough in their degree in all societies, yet it has been, and still remains, a defect of some of the greatest French writers to expect a fruit from such performances which they can never bear. In the long run a great ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 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 which ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... 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 texts ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that amounted to fatuity there seemed to be no watch kept on board the ships, and there were no lights visible. All was as still and silent as the grave. The Union was the next craft in line; she was a gunboat, and had already shewn herself capable of stinging pretty severely, ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... journal the revelations of an observer who was surprised to 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 easily, of the same signals, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... no interruption to his calculations, and the petit-maitre, in a tone of philosophic fatuity, asked, "Of the numbers of your English or Irish wives—all excellent—how many, I pray you, do you calculate are now married to the man they first, fell in love with, as they call it? My good sir, not five ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 my credulity. No simpleton ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... with the recent protest from military men in the Spectator about the "Military Babu," who is occupying an ever larger and larger place in the life of the Army. There will be a revolt one of these days against the fatuity of this eternal filling up of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... then the frequency of its use; but, as is generally the case, 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 ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... 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 his ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... with a strange fatuity, left him to superintend sundry alterations in his house at Heimersleben, arranging for him meanwhile to read classics with the resident clergyman, Rev. Dr. Nagel. Being thus for a time his own master, temptation opened wide doors before him. He was ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidences of our wisdom. We are so self-satisfied with our own customs, that we hold up our hands with surprise at the fatuity of men who presume to point out to us their defects. Those practices in which we most widely depart from the broad and recognised morality of all civilised ages and countries are to us the Palladiums of our ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... 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 world—a solitary straggler out of the circumference of Nature's law—a monster ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary "sins," Determinism would simply ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... with two or three gaudily-dressed negresses, who showed their white teeth and their black muzzles from the doors of the casernes, and to laugh at the chaplain of the garrison, for such I conclude was the grade of the old priest, who met us, toddling about in a state of drunken fatuity, very much resembling the condition of Obadiah in the Committee, with a nose exhibiting the visible effects of a fight or a fall. Having escaped at last from the good man's persecuting attentions, we got back to Cannes ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... 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
... clumsiness, ill-breeding, stupidity, boorishness, fatuity, ill manners, unmannerliness, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... came would insure disaster. Fatuous self-complacency or vanity, or short-sightedness in refusing to prepare for danger, is both foolish and wicked in such a nation as ours; and past experience has shown that such fatuity in refusing to recognize or prepare for any crisis in advance is usually succeeded by a mad panic of hysterical fear once ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... studied him attentively whilst he was at breakfast. Having done so, not a single doubt remains me of our success. As for what he looks like, I could entertain you at length upon the fashion in which nature has designed his gross fatuity. But that is no matter. We are concerned with what he is, with the wit of him. And I tell you confidently that I find him so dull and stupid that you may be confident he will tumble headlong into each and all of the traps I have so ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... 'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say, of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had (as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly assuaged their vague regrets. It was not ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... brought us to New York together were not nearly so frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving the reasons why he thought himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... revelations of an observer who was surprised to 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 ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... the vein, "the agitations of his mind and body" were an 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... latter an English historian [Footnote: Lord Macaulay. Nor was much, if any, more to be hoped for from Pitt, afterwards first Earl of Chatham.] has said that his selfish ambition "was so intense a passion, that it supplied the place of talents and inspired even fatuity with cunning." Not under such auspices was the Episcopate to be given ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... spectacles of anguish and risks of infection? How could she guess that such women are the spiritual sisters of poor heathen and savage Hottentot and Malay mothers and daughters, who, sooner than be burdened with the wailing helplessness of infancy and the mumbling fatuity of age, will expose the children dependent on these murderesses, and the hoary heads that once planned and prayed for the welfare of their slayers, to perish ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... 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 ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... be profound insight, and it might be profound fatuity. Rowland turned away; he could not ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... the town a gap broken 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 resembling dog biscuit sown ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Cornelia still 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 was ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... excitement and progress of popular feeling; but the scorn of all serious and monitory predictions of its ultimate result was at all events to be kept up,—in whatever proportions a time-serving interest and an honest fatuity might share in dictating this elated and contemptuous style. Should the latter of these ingredients at present predominate in the temper which throws off the fume of this high style, it will not leave much faculty in the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... quarter million years before Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One. All this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at least that—the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the West, with our creation ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... last extreme of luxury, 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. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... years and the consequences 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 to live upon out there, where she ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... 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 to ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... 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, write his letters, and look after their transmission, without ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... desperate, but 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 ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... think where he had put the matches, and remembered there were some on the widow-sill. The room was so dark that he could not see the foot of the bed, and in his fatuity he had barricaded himself in the room with the loathsome reptile which was to ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... 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 to make amends for having discomfited ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... I find my eyes wet with tears, for the beauty 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 be purged ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... at Rouletabile, who turned as red as the comb of a rooster and was rather embarrassed at his fatuity. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... 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 ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... and as for him, he was almost confused in spite of the assurance which is like a matter of costume for a diplomatist. But not for long. The Marquise took refuge at once in the friendliness of manner which women use as a defence against the misinterpretations of fatuity, a manner which admits of no afterthought, while it paves the way to sentiment (to make use of a figure of speech), tempering the transition through the ordinary forms of politeness. In this ambiguous ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mohammed, 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 of that story of the pigeon, trained ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... monopoly of slave- hunting for the Spanish colonies and an opening for contraband trade. In the river Plate region, where the dissensions of Spaniards and Portuguese afforded another opening, English traders smuggled. The Spaniards, with monstrous fatuity, refused to make use of the superb waterways provided by the Parana and Paraguay, and endeavoured to stifle all trade. England's main struggle was with France. It was prolonged by her entanglement in European ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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
... me the printed 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 ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... This play 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 ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... Tavistock, and lovingly 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... disposed to gauge Shelby's vogue with the groundlings as greater than before, and lamented it to Bernard Graves, who fell wholly into his mood for once and deplored the fatuity of ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application of satire, and too humble for the incitement ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... significantly: "With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally from both races." After this truthful testimony, which Pelion upon Ossa of evidence has confirmed, does Mr. Froude, in the fatuity of his skin-pride, believe that educated men, worthy of the name, would be otherwise than resentful, if not disgusted, at being shunted out of bread in their own native land, which their parents' labours and taxes have made desirable, in order to afford room to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... things, 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 explicit as to his whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... thing to like you for—your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many." He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase. ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... into her arms, God makes her the love-magistrate of the family; and her instincts and moral nature fit her to adjudicate questions of weakness and want. And when society is on the eve of adjudicating such questions as these, it is a monstrous fatuity to exclude from them the very ones that, by nature, and training, and instinct, are best fitted ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... world has yet seen. The biolog personates an individual type, like an aberration of human nature, which may be found anywhere and at any time. The etholog personates a specimen of a class which helps to characterize a period. Dandies exist at all times, but vary in detail. The fatuity and vanity of all dandies are features for the etholog; the follies of the dandy of a period belong to the biolog. Beau Brummel would be a model for a biolog. The etholog is apt to overlook his best subjects. He cannot himself escape from his own times enough to recognize them. He never satirizes ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 in the past and in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... thing, or that he might have guarded against being forced to act in such a manner. And it is desirable to prove by definitions that this conduct of his ought not to be called imprudence, or accident, or necessity, but indolence, indifference, or fatuity. ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her—he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... 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
... later. But they've not got 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 ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... politics! Doubtless, respecting the latter, one needs first to realize, from actual observation, the squalor, vice and doggedness ingrain'd in the bulk-population of the British islands, with the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkeyism everywhere, to understand the last meaning in his pages. Accordingly, though he was no chartist or radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most indignant comment or protest anent the fruits of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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 enrich his own collection—not ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... feel 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
... as an arch-simpleton among nations. Its vanity is stupendous, eclipsing all previously known vanities. The Great General Staff must know fairly well how matters stand, and yet not the mere ignorant public, but the King of Bavaria himself, had the fatuity as late as last week to talk about the new territory that Germany would annex as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... now at liberty to believe, without too much fatuity, that you love another," said the young man, in a caressing tone, "and I repeat that I am really interested ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... case the axiom seemed, after the manner of all general rules, to bulwark itself with an exception. Colonel Musgrave continued to emanate an air of contentment which fell perilously short of fatuity; and that Patricia was honestly fond of him was evident to the most impecunious of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... an hour to recover my quiet mind. After all, it is as idle to rage against man's fatuity as to hope that he will ever be less a fool. For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle. Why, I have known the day when it would have been beyond my power altogether, or else would have cost me a meal. Wherefore, let me again ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... is willing to confess himself very intimately acquainted, and, therefore, its pains and pleasures are kept secret. But what the author says of its happiness, seems applicable only to fatuity, or gross dulness; for that inferiority of understanding, which makes one man, without any other reason, the slave, or tool, or property of another, which makes him sometimes useless, and sometimes ridiculous, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... to be played that evening: all this has been done. I cannot give you much of Boursoufle [done by one Vanture]. Mademoiselle Piggery [DE LA COCHONNIERE, Madame du Chatelet herself] executed so perfectly the extravagance of her part, that I own it gave me real pleasure. But Vanture only put his own fatuity into the character of Boursoufle, which wanted more: he played naturally in a Piece where all requires to be forced, like the subject of it."—What a pity none of us has read this fine Farce! "One Paris did the part of MUSCADIN ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... time to collect or read them." And yet seeing what may be done in this regard by care and system, and that the greatest readers have been the busiest men, it seems strange that persons of intelligence should thus express themselves; should admit such obvious fatuity of view ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... 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 ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... idiotic thing which is 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 not ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed singularly diminished. It was, in fact, that which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... lack of reserve, her indelicacy. Her good-natured laughter with the men who crowded about her familiarly was a kind of disloyalty. She seemed at times to be exchanging doubtful jests with them; and at last, to protect her from the results of her own fatuity, he danced with her himself—danced almost incessantly, notwithstanding the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... thinks about them. And that makes it very fortunate that the term of the President is limited, because no president could stand it for a number of years. But when the lid is off, I am going to resume my study of the dictionary to find adequate terms in which to describe the fatuity of these gentlemen with their poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere. I cannot express my contempt for their intelligence, but because I think I know the people of the United States, I can ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... 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 descent ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... which brought them together was an agreement entered into some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... collision, or at least to postpone it to a period beyond the close of his official term. The management of the whole affair was what Talleyrand describes as something worse than a crime—a blunder. Whatever treatment the case demanded, should have been prompt; to wait was fatuity. ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the carriage-folk, the man who had put it up had sought the Kingdom himself, and had, if all was true, found it. Joe Longstaffe was by common consent a Christian man, and not of that too general kind which excuses its foolishness and fatuity on the ground of its religion. The Duke's agent disliked him for political reasons, but he would admit that the dissenter was the best farmer in the countryside; and the labourers would have added that he was also ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... hyperbole. But it was obvious from the stir of officialdom that the signer of the demand wanted his daughter very much and was accustomed to having his wants respectfully carried out. One feature of the message would have convinced the Tyro, had he seen it, of the fatuity of fatherhood. It described the fugitive ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mouth of Pemaquid River. It was a quadrangle, with ramparts of rough stone, built at great pains and cost, but exposed to artillery, and incapable of resisting heavy shot. The government of Massachusetts, with its usual military fatuity, had placed it in the keeping of an unfit commander, and permitted some of the yeoman garrison to bring their wives and children to this ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... 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" to the owner of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... 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
... against loan-money, and what arguments they had used, this person was to be charged in his majesty's name, and upon his allegiance, not to disclose to any other the answer he had given. A striking instance of that fatuity of the human mind, when a weak government is trying to do what it knows not how to perform: it was seeking to obtain a secret purpose by the most open and general means: a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... rose-leaves had been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage, while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin—a process which resulted ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to 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
... been annihilated, and James VIII. proclaimed at the Cross of Edinburgh. Well did the brave Highlanders indignantly demand, 'What did you call us to arms for? Was it to run away? What did our own King come for? Was it to see us butchered by hangmen?' There was a fatuity that accompanied all their undertakings which neutralised intrepidity, devotedness, and bravery which the annals of no other people can exhibit, and paltry jealousies which stultified exertions, which, independently of political results, astonished ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... their way in the religious ceremonies, even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity immediately after. The natives and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus not to waste time over such fatuity. [36] ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... and intriguing bustle of Naples, he retired, at the early age of 34, to his natal village of Macchia, throwing over one or two offers of lucrative worldly appointments. He describes himself as wholly disenchanted with the "facile fatuity" of Liberalism, the fact being, that he lacked what a French psychologist has called the function of the real; his temperament was not of the kind to cope with actualities. This retirement is an epoch in his life—it is the Grand Renunciation. Henceforward ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... their forerunner, and still called him a quack while 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 OF DISEASE ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... not know that it was written to pass the time by one who had ruled this great empire for years, and who within a few years more was destined to rule it again. It was a fanciful and almost sympathetic satire on the selfish fatuity of the noble, wealthy, and governing orders of British society. But then the author of this burlesque was himself about to ask these orders to admit him to their select ranks, and to enthrone him as ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... more sober, less en l'air, less coquette, less taken by show, less prone to set an undue value on outside excellence—to make much of the attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature, des couleurs de poupee, un nez plus ou moins bien fait, and an enormous amount of fatuity—I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an exemplary character. But, as it was——And here the little man's voice ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... but he will think none the worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself; and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... breaches of the pebble ridge. And the risk of a heavy sea 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 try to know better. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... 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 if he had spoken Welsh ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of London Nina had one acquaintance, and an hour or so later, after drinking some tea, she set forth to visit this acquaintance. The weight of her own foolishness, fatuity, silliness, and ignorance was heavy upon her. And, moreover, she had been told that Mr. Lionel Belmont had already departed back to America, his luggage being marked for the ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 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 seal ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... nature, but how do I know what he means by that? 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
... as he spoke pointedly to the Queen on the subject, who pretended only to have contemplated the ridiculous side of her new adorer's gallantries. But when Jarze next made his appearance in her cabinet, she rated him roundly before the whole Court upon his absurd fatuity, and forbade him ever to enter her presence again. The Prince de Conde, pretending to feel hurt at the affront put upon Jarze, early next morning paid the Prime Minister a visit, and insolently demanded that Jarze should be received ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... be ready for head-way 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, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 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
... grant the proposition that there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I could see that from this moment he would be filled with a passionate pity ever so little qualified by a sense of the girl's fatuity and folly. She was always accessible to him—that I knew; for if she had told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have resented the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... exigencies of hypocrisy, which he would put on if he could. His infamy, his profligacy, can proceed even from no perverted energy of character, and must therefore be associated with contempt. There is a lively fatuity about him that is uniformly a symptom of imbecility. Among women, at least, it is so, and I have no doubt but it is the same with men. Alice, I know what my fate will be. It is true, you may see me married to him; but you will see me drop ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... 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
... history has heard of Garrick's contest with Madam Clairon, and the triumph which the English Roscius achieved over the Siddons of the French stage, by his representation of the father struck with fatuity on beholding his only infant child dashed to pieces by leaping in its joy from his arms: perhaps the sole remaining conquest for histrionic tragedy is somewhere in the unexplored regions of the mind, below the ordinary understanding, amidst the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... it. If it be thus 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 of heaven, that the foul ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of the New Testament read, by some strange fatuity, touches also the despair of the city. It told of Christ betrayed by Iscariot, deserted by his disciples, saying to his few trusty ones: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad." ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... shell, two things gave me a shock of intense surprise. First, I could not conceive how the Catholic Church had got on for eighteen hundred years without my cooperation and ability; and, secondly, I could not understand what fatuity possessed the Bishop to appoint as his vicar-general a feeble old man of seventy, who preached with hesitation, and, it was whispered, believed the world was flat, and that people were only joking when they spoke of it as a globe; and pass over such a paragon of perfection, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... for suspicious characters, and had let just enough of the plot—as it was known to him—leak out, to put all the household on the qui vive to apprehend any would-be assassin of their beloved young master. But with that fatuity which often ruins the plans of "mice and men," he had failed to inform even his subordinate Falto of the likelihood of Agias arriving from Rome. It had obviously been desirable that it should not be bruited among the servants that Cornelia and Drusus were still communicating, and ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... of the nobles.] As the petty acts of the nobles had brought out into relief the large policy of Tiberius, so it was now. They resorted to even lower tricks than accusations of tyranny, and found in the fatuity or dishonesty of Drusus a tool even more effective than Nasica's brutality. The plantation of a colony at Carthage was looked at askance by many Romans. It was the first colony planted out of Italy, and the superstitious ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... 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, and even ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... 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 with a purpose. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... replied the other with an adorable fatuity. "You are not yet accustomed to it; but, never mind, one quickly becomes so. See how after a single month I find myself at ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
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