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More "Fatuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trooper. In order to appreciate the situation exactly I should add that it has long been a mooted point between Josephine and me whether chimneys require to be swept at all. My darling insists that the sweep shall overhaul the house annually, while I cling, with what she is pleased to call masculine fatuity, to the theory that soot, like sleeping dogs, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... 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
... 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 up ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... said, was 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 ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... was, at times, in the expression of his eye, an indescribable mixture of imbecility and enthusiasm, as though the spirit of some Eastern fakir had reanimated a living body. A gleam of almost supernatural intelligence was mingled with an expression of fatuity, that in less enlightened ages would have invested him with the dangerous reputation of priest or prophet in the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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, is often felt with very ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... fatuity cries out for a lesson. What! you, a civilian, and so lucky as to be the husband-designate of Madame de Vaudremont, a widow of two-and-twenty, burdened with four thousand napoleons a year—a woman who slips such a diamond ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... would know nothing, or would smile in his foolish way to see her so brave; and for her mother, she recked not so long as she had a larded capon before her: nor was it possible to make the young queen understand that this fatuity and feebleness were the very reasons for ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... interpose in the manner of throwing out his hand, a gesture speaking of the fatuity and his unwillingness to set himself ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... 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 have hung back to-night. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... possible 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 ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... clever and a pleasant memento of the Great Exhibition. The drawings are careful and clever, and convey a very correct representation of the original creatures, with all, or nearly all, their subtlety of expression and aspect. The capital fatuity of the Rabbits and Hares, the delightful scoundrelism of the Fox, the cunning shrewdness of the Marten and Weasels, the hoyden visages of the Kittens, and the cool, slippery demeanour of the Frogs, are all capitally ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... These resemblances have been noted 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 ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... estranged 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 ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... 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, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... 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
... (Ah! And, parenthetically, pay my debts at bridge and baccarat). I dote on Futurism, and so a mate would give me little ease Whose views were strictly orthodox on MYRON and PRAXITELES. You do not understand," she sneered, "so gross is your fatuity; Well then, I answer 'No,' without ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... privilege have long 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
... other person on the earth had been miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism. They saw beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they had but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson—I cannot deny that the book is didactic—of the change wrought by the comet is that man should find the full expression of his personality in sympathy and ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... emperor was thus filling all the courts of Europe with his clamor against Count Neuperg, declaring that he had exceeded his powers and that he deserved to be hung, he at the same time, with almost idiotic fatuity, sent the same Count Neuperg back to the Turkish camp to settle some items which yet required adjustment. This proved, to every mind, the insincerity of Charles. The Russians, thus forsaken by Austria, also made peace ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... he felt as uncomfortable as a dreaming man who knows that he is asleep. And yet, he looked round at the fair reality about him with a confidence to which envious minds might have given the name of fatuity. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... something to hold a woman—no, perhaps not that—but something to startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon Lady Holme by that something in Carey's eyes. What she had said to Robin Pierce ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... "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 an useful, perhaps an exemplary character. But, as it was—And here, the little man's voice was for ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... around me, like a chicken just out of its 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 ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... 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
... 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 those who ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... With strange fatuity the French employed another device to destroy the fleet of the invaders and carry terror into their ranks. A flotilla of fire-ships was loaded to the gunwale with pitch, tar, powder bombs, grenades, and ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... 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 ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Dandin, in which the folly of unequal marriage between the substantial farmer and the fine lady is mocked with bitter gaiety. Before the year closed Moliere, continuing to write in prose, returned to Plautus, and surpassed him in L'Avare. To be rich and miserly is in itself a form of fatuity; but Harpagon is not only miserly but amorous, as far as a ruling passion will admit one of subordinate influence. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), a lesson of good sense to those who suffer from the social ambition to rise above their proper rank, is wholly original; it mounts ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... or Belfast? In such circumstances, of what use is it for critics any longer to go on squabbling over Gaelic editions, collecting and collating mediaeval Gaelic ballads, and asserting with hopeless fatuity that he was the author of these poems, or that he stole them from the Irish? The Irish themselves are as ignorant of the subject as he is; and yet in spite of all this ignorance on his part and theirs, the text of his translation has received on every page of it the unequivocal countersign of ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... my clue: she has laid open her whole heart. She has the fatuity to mimic the perfect heroine! Tell her but it is a duty, and with the Bramin wives she would lie down, calmly and resolutely, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... 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 ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... 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
... 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 more in possession ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mrs. Martin,—I am standing in Henrietta's place, she says—but not, I say, to answer your letter to her yesterday, but your letter to me, some weeks ago—which I meant to answer much more immediately if the ignis fatuus of a house (you see to what a miserable fatuity I am reduced, of applying your pure country metaphors to our brick pollutions) had not been gliding just before us, and I had not much wished to be able to tell you of our settlement. As it is, however, I must write, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... philosophy, perhaps the most 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 Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... The fond fatuity with which he had welcomed that starry-eyed little creature had been rudely overthrown. And his pride smarted at the idea of the whispers that might echo and re-echo through his palace. He was too wise an old hand to flatter himself that ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... 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 ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... 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 hearers ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 (Little Coxcomb), which name represents ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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. Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth and intelligence, who, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... gave her the 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 disputes and by political causes, by the want of co-operation ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... tacitly 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 would always be glad to regard him as a friend. What ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... The discovery of his fatuity was not of soothing effect. "'T war that man Renfrew's secret—I hearn about his letter what war read down ter ...
— A Chilhowee Lily - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 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 ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... England. The Queen of Scots was guarded more closely than ever, the Duke of Norfolk was arrested; yet Philip, whose share in the conspiracy had remained a secret, was not discouraged by the absolute explosion of the whole affair. He still held to an impossible purpose with a tenacity which resembled fatuity. He avowed that his obligations in the sight of God were so strict that he was still determined to proceed in the sacred cause. He remitted, therefore, the promised funds to the Duke of Alva, and urged him to act with ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... involved in its very nature a sustaining hope for the future. Among many alleviations, there was one, which, (not wisely, but overcome by circumstances) all were willing to admit;—that the event was so strange and uncouth, exhibiting such discordant characteristics of innocent fatuity and enormous guilt, that it could not without violence be thought of as indicative of a general constitution of things, either in the country or the government; but that it was a kind of lusus naturae, in the moral world—a solitary straggler out of the circumference of Nature's law—a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... done this thing, or that 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
... argument is that on the lips of those who but a short time before were explaining, with a good deal of zest and with absolute frankness, how they intended to compass our ruin? There is something almost amiable in fatuity like this. A touch of ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... 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 ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... which giant 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 in the entanglement ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... with some fatuity, "I am happy to think I have a part of vos larmes, Miss Blanche"—And the major (who had not read more than six pages of Pen's book) put on his sanctified look, saying, "Yes, there are some passages quite affecting, mons'ous affecting: and,"—"O, if it makes ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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, ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... house-pastimes.' 'I will not,' he says, 'agree in forbidding cards, dice, and other like games of Hazard,' and enters into an argument for his opinion, which is scarcely worth quoting. See Basilicon Doron—a prodigy of royal fatuity—but the perfect 'exponent' of the characteristics of the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... passing individual and social lives of the most contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink into a slough of complacency and fatuity? ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the precieuses went in inventing locutions by which they were to be recognized as elegant, is generally exaggerated; Livet says that out of six hundred women hardly thirty could be accused of such fatuity. The wiser and more conservative women did adopt a large number of expressions which were necessary for refinement of language and these classicisms were exaggerated by some of the provincial classes who ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... would have 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 ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... 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
... had worked himself into 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 what we hear of his facility in striking up ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would 'a' been just like that if she'd 'a' lived," she said to Mandy Meacham, with the tender fatuity of mothers. "Johnnie seems like a daughter to me—an' I know in my soul no daughter could be kinder. Look at her makin' me keep every cent Pap had in the bank, when Laurelly could have claimed ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... in "Social Forces in England and America" observed that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom because there were the children to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the end of the book, he complained that all the babies were being had by the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... insisted upon exacting the full penalties and extent of the law for encroachments upon its privileges, it was quite heedless of the rights of others. There probably never was in the world a case of such blind fatuity as that of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in building and maintaining its dam. From the first it must have been known to every member of the club, as it certainly was to every resident of the South Fork and Conemaugh Valleys, that if the water ever began ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and solemn, and fanatical Dr. Grimshaw, her destined bridegroom, who really and truly loved the child to fatuity, and conscientiously did the very best he could for her mental and moral welfare, according to his light. Alas! "when the light that is in one is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Jacquelina rewarded his serious efforts with laughter, and flattered him with the pet names of Hobgoblin, Ghoul, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... not run the risk: and I know, after all, you will be just and kind where you can.) I have read your letter again and again. I will tell you—no, not you, but any imaginary other person, who should hear what I am going to avow; I would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall I call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment I never dreamed of winning your love. I can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem; such a change of our places does it imply—nor, next to that, though ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... first time Miss Levering bent her head forward slightly as though to see how far he was conscious of the fatuity of his climax. But his flushed face showed a childlike ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... 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. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... with paternal fatuity, especially as the boy's name happened to be Reginald Francis, after ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... reference to Lord Brittleback. I think that he was wrong, and I said so all through. But, heavens on earth—!" and instead of completing his speech Harold Smith turned away his head, and struck his hands together in token of his astonishment at the fatuity of the age. What he probably meant to express was this: that if such a good deed as that late appointment made at the Petty Bag Office were not held sufficient to atone for that other evil deed to which he had alluded, there ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... 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 ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Long before he attained any proficiency upon one, he would take that back to wherever it came from, and bring home another; till at last she felt it a duty to remonstrate with the fellow upon the fatuity of not getting something one wanted at first and then sticking to it. Not that she wasn't well aware how little real liveliness was to be got out of any of his instruments! She could understand his disgust with them. But let him ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... a modern railway station, as of old at the city gates, the fatuity of human aspirations may be studied advantageously. Soldiers were there, at Victoria, hundreds of them, lined up on a distant platform, and they symbolised the spirit of an age which exalts Mechanism to the pinnacle of a deity and which ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... of time; that, without a miracle, an edifice founded upon iniquity and cemented by falsehood must crush you before you could lay the top-stone. You would not be warned—you held on your way without hesitation or compunction, and now you would add to sin fatuity. Do you suppose that after what your husband has learned of your untruthfulness he will accept your assertion on any subject without inquiry? And, how many in your own family and out of it—although these may not know you by ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... understand this subject, and our strength and weakness in relation to 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, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... wound or scratch of the skin—a resistance which is not shown by many savage races—they yet allow house-flies to swarm in their dwellings, to run about and sample their food, with an indifference which is, when the truth is known, truly horrible in its fatuity and foolhardiness. For the fact is that the feet and proboscis of the common house-fly are covered with microbes of all sorts, picked up by his explorations upon every kind of filth. At every step which he takes he plants a few dozen ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... on the spot. When, at length, their numbers and persistent fury prevailed, their only prize was some twenty Huron warriors, spent with fatigue and faint with loss of blood. The rest lay dead around the shattered palisades which they had so valiantly defended. Fatuity, not cowardice, was the ruin of the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... sang from musical 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 statistics of anthropology ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... enhance than diminish the importance of its conservation. Yet the only argument against it is, that it is generous, broad, inspiring; and the only appeal in opposition to it must be made to the coldness of skepticism, the suicidal miserliness of egotism, or the folly and fatuity of ignorance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... 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 "sins," ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... too gross a use—the whole thing was quiet. In the house was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-room was—by which I meant must be—a lady, a charming English lady. There was, it seemed to me, no fatuity in believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not please her to be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore, when, before we had gone many yards, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... 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
... share the social ambitions of the Lavilettes. He liked his political popularity, and he was only concerned for that. He had that touch of shrewdness to save him from fatuity where the Lavilettes were concerned. He was determined to associate with the ceremony all the primitive customs of the country. He had come of a race of simple farmers, and he was consistent enough to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... endowed with talismanic power over the secrets of futurity. Could it be possible that Miss Jane had really seen what was taking place many miles distant? Reason shook her hoary head, and jeered at such childish fatuity; but superstitious credulity, goaded by an intense anxiety, would not be silenced nor put to the blush, but boldly babbled ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... 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 and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and sequel of Sir Toby, fitly serves the double purpose of a butt and a foil to the latter, at once drawing him out and setting him off. Ludicrously proud of the most petty, childish irregularities, which, however, his natural fatuity keeps him from acting, and barely suffers him to affect, on this point he reminds us of that impressive imbecility, Abraham Slender; yet not in such sort as to encroach at all on Slender's province. There can scarcely ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... her Magnolia. I'm really writing all this rot to get myself into the "twitter-twitter" mood. One of the characters in my new comedy talks like a character in a book by E. F. Benson, and I have to work myself up into a state of babbling fatuity before I can write her ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... portrait, immersed in an atmosphere of self-adoration. At intervals he straightened himself, distended his chest, elevated his chin and glanced round with an air of haughty dignity, though there was none to witness and to be impressed. In Wall Street there is a fatuity which, always epidemic among the small fry, infects wise and foolish, great and small, whenever a paretic dream of an enormous haul at a single cast of the net happens to come true. This paretic fatuity now had possession of James; in imagination he was crowning and draping ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... pond, and narrowed again to a stream, divided the house from the fields that ran between it and the river; the decent thatched roofs and whitewashed walls of the farm, and the elm trees that grew beside it, were mirrored in the pond. A flotilla of geese and ducks paraded, in stately fatuity, to and fro across the mirror. A battered little wooden bridge, painted green, enabled the people of the farm to reach the banks of the river. Christian crossed it, and went up to the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... in the decaying ripeness of the Bourbon dynasty drove the Louis from Paris to Versailles and from Versailles to Marly. Millions were wasted to build the vast monument of royal fatuity, and when it was done the Grand Monarque found it necessary to fly from time to time to the sham solitude and mock retirement he had built ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... used to bid 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 that greatly assuaged their vague regrets. It was not till the following ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... course, a calamitous folly. From the very first, from the moment when the commercial traveller had with incomparable rash fatuity thrown the paper pellet over the counter, Sophia's awakening commonsense had told her that in yielding to her instinct she was sowing misery and shame for herself; but she had gone on, as if under a spell. It had needed the irretrievableness of flight from home to begin the breaking of the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... torpid fatuity of Voltaire's Biographers, says he never met with one Frenchman, even of the Literary classes, who could tell him whence this name VOLTAIRE originated. 'A PETITE TERRE, small family estate,' they said; and sent him hunting through Topographies, far and wide, to no purpose. Others answered, 'Volterra ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... hulls of a shape something between a cocoa-nut and a 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 of both. There are ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... in a moment of fatuity made Granby a magistrate. Magistrates should learn to condense their wisdom into sentences. Granby beats out his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... 'romping in.' A hundred posters were required within an hour. He had nearly refused the order, in his feverish fatigue and his disgust, but some remnant of sagacity had asserted itself in him and saved him from this fatuity. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... everything inappropriate. But the amiable woman's prattle deserted her when she found 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
... things as bad because they do not agree therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And I believe that there is no period of our literature which, when studied, will do more to prevent or correct such fatuity than this very period of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... bread of the public mind. He probably thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view; the weak voice, the colourless personality as incapable of an attitude as a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that time and place—no, it wasn't worth much. And then, for him, an accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly 'bad business.' His business was to write a readable ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... ridiculous enough to stamp Germany for a century 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 a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... doing anything with or for these people. The fiat for their overthrow had evidently been issued. The fatuity which leads to self-destruction was fixed upon them; and, with a feeling rather of commiseration than anger, I prepared to leave the house. In this interview, I made a discovery, which tended still more to lessen the hostility I might otherwise have felt toward my uncle. I ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... while her life was a triumph, and her mother triumphed with her at an humble distance. The Duchess had no daughter, and was devoted to her with the blind fatuity with which ladies of rank at times will invest themselves in a caprice. She arrogated to herself all the praises of her beauty and wit, allowed her to flirt and make conquests to her heart's content, and engaged to marry her to some handsome young officer of her train, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... to himself over the retreat of Bott, thinking with some paternal fatuity of the attractiveness and spirit of his daughter, when a shadow fell across him, and he saw ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... to the glade of the columbines. She did not feel any longer the antipathy she once felt to the spot that had, in one devastating moment, revealed to her the fatuity of her dreams. Now she was in search of the old hopes that she had once revelled in, while she gathered armloads of columbines, and imagined they ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... he had a high thought in him really though a most misguided one. Titular King of Men; but much bewildered into mere indolent fatuity, inane solemnity, high sniffing pride grounded on nothing at all; a Kaiser much sunk in the sediments of his muddy Epoch. Sure enough, he was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials, reticences;—and could, in a better scene, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when he wrote Calvin on May 25, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... produce some of the dreadful scenes of St. Domingo." The next day Rutledge again warned the House against even discussing the matter, as "very serious, nay, dreadful effects, must be the inevitable consequence." He held up the most lurid pictures of the fatuity of the French Convention in listening to the overtures of the "three emissaries from St. Domingo," and thus yielding "one of the finest islands in the world" to "scenes which had never been practised since the destruction of ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... launch was a disappointment. He had set his heart upon a first class, but he had not gone to work in the right way. Instead of concentrating his attention on the task in hand, he could only in later days look back with amazement 'at the fatuity of his arrangements and the snail-like progress with which he seemed to be satisfied.' He was content if, on his final review of Thucydides, he got through twenty or thirty chapters a day, and he reread Sophocles 'at the lazy rate of a hundred and fifty lines a day, instead ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... those which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of fatuity Geoffrey, if he had followed his impulse, would have flung McVay back in the closet and locked the door. Instead, ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... from England, which, if they could not restore the dead, served at least to renovate the living; and Schomberg was ready to take the field early in the year 1690, notwithstanding the loss of about 10,000 men. James, with the constitutional fatuity of the Stuarts, had lost his opportunity. If he had attacked the motley army of the revolutionary party while the men were suffering from want and disease, and while his own troops were fresh and courageous, he might have ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... fair. At the end of 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 with ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... it comes out still a Dishonesty, with a new dress on it, a new colour to it. 'While we ourselves continue valets, how can any hero come to govern us?' We are governed, very infallibly, by the 'sham-hero,'—whose name is Quack, whose work and governance is Plausibility, and also is Falsity and Fatuity; to which Nature says, and must say when it comes to her to speak, eternally No! Nations cease to be befriended of the Law-Maker, when they walk not according to the Law. The Sphinx-question remains unsolved by them, becomes ever ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... therefore, in Madame 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 ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... a 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 ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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 ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... profound insight, and it might be profound fatuity. Rowland turned away; he could ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... numbers and persistent fury prevailed, their only prize was some twenty Huron warriors, spent with fatigue and faint with loss of blood. The rest lay dead around the shattered palisades which they had so valiantly defended. Fatuity, not cowardice, was the ruin ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... 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 ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... 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 and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... involved him in a difficulty,' he said. 'It is his own fault. I will leave him to meditate on the incredible fatuity—the hare-brained recklessness—which have brought him to this pass. It will be a lesson to him. I, meantime, will give myself unreservedly to the ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... passion and importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were so many Joan-of-Arcs; but this does not come out in their behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain that women do not like this sort of thing; but really, after having bemused myself over "Daniel Deronda," I have given up trying to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... was that no more than three great hearts pursued the black ram with its wagging burden into the forest. Of whom one, feeling the fatuity of slaying the slain, or having, it may be, some lurking seed of nominalism fomenting within, beat off the others and unstrapped the victim's arms ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... as a melancholy lost creature, who was past all worldly help or hope. Never mind, I must cast about for some new scheme of life; and the repayment of Harry's debt to me at this juncture enabled me to live at least for some months even, or years to come. O strange fatuity of youth! I often say. How was it that we dared to be so poor and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ask, that can induce a reasoning soul to do thus? Why!—lack of society, want of current information, the long and tedious winter, and the labours of spring and of autumn. In fact, it is "the backwoods," the listlessness of the backwoods, which, like the opposite extreme, the fatuity and blase life of a great metropolis, causes men to rush into insane extremes to avoid reflection. The mind ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... so swiftly from the depths of penury to the 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
... 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 ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... 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, which are ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... 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. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... apparently, instead of in the Bay of Larne or Belfast? In such circumstances, of what use is it for critics any longer to go on squabbling over Gaelic editions, collecting and collating mediaeval Gaelic ballads, and asserting with hopeless fatuity that he was the author of these poems, or that he stole them from the Irish? The Irish themselves are as ignorant of the subject as he is; and yet in spite of all this ignorance on his part and theirs, the text of his translation has received on every page of it the unequivocal countersign ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... kind of argument is that on the lips of those who but a short time before were explaining, with a good deal of zest and with absolute frankness, how they intended to compass our ruin? There is something almost amiable in fatuity like this. A touch of the fool softens ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... 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
... this should be so, seeing that she had still regarded Clara as being in all things a child; and as she thought further, she wondered at her own fatuity, in that she had allowed herself ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... significance of the defendant's signals. I am aware that my voice is singularly deficient in producing either the dulcet tones of my fair client or the impassioned vehemence of the defendant's response. I will," continued the Colonel, with a fatigued but blind fatuity that ignored the hurriedly knit brows and warning eyes of the Judge, "try again. The note uttered by my client" (lowering his voice to the faintest of falsettos) "was 'Keeree;' the response was 'Keerow-ow.'" And the Colonel's voice fairly shook the ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... no single man can now fill our mental horizon; we can see around and above the greatest of the past: the overman of to-day is only on the next round of the ladder, and our children will smile at the fatuity of ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... concurring in what has been asserted by many persons, that France lost Egypt at the very moment when it seemed most easy of preservation. Egypt was conquered by a genius of vast intelligence, great capacity, and profound military science. Fatuity, stupidity, and incapacity lost it. What was the result of that memorable expedition? The destruction of one of our finest armies; the loss of some of our best generals; the annihilation of our navy; the surrender of Malta; and the sovereignty of England in the Mediterranean. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... extra power in another. The blind come to have a sense of touch much more acute than those who see. Persons born without hands have been known to acquire a power of using their feet for a number of the principal offices usually served by that member. I need hardly say how remarkably fatuity is compensated by the more than usual regard paid to the children born with it by their parents, and the zeal which others usually feel to protect and succour such persons. In short, we never see evil of any ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... police who attended; and, indeed, the party selected for the service of this day ought rather to have been increased, inasmuch as the bailiff in question had rendered himself so justly obnoxious to the people, that it was fatuity itself to suppose that, smarting as they were under the scoundrel's wanton and obscene insults, it was possible they would suffer him to escape. The party had, consequently, no sooner set out, than the horns once more began to blow, the bells to ring, and the whole ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... 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 (Little Coxcomb), ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of him, except, perhaps, when all the others went to the "Coons". Coons were insufferably stupid to Miriam, so he thought they were to himself also, and he preached priggishly to Annie about the fatuity of listening to them. Yet he, too, knew all their songs, and sang them along the roads roisterously. And if he found himself listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to Annie ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... 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, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... The third is the 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 ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... daughter," he said, with a kind of pride in his voice, and the rest chose to consider this as the fatuity of an old man ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... with the fatuity common in all strong temptations, "I'll spend a few more hours with this rare Undine, this genuine woman, who—infinitely more beautiful than Venus—is rising out of the dark waters of sorrow, shame, and despair, and then ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... 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
... red-cheeked, blowsy, dirty wench with a baby in her arms, and left some change for the baby. He was in a very tolerant and charitable mood, and could excuse the sins and the stupidity of all mankind. He reflected forgivingly that Rose Euclid and her friends had perhaps not displayed an abnormal fatuity in discussing the name of the theatre before they had got the lease of the site for it. Had not he himself bought all the option without having even seen the site? The fact was that he had had no leisure in his short royal career ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... In the verse of our second poet, Milton—so great that before his name the word "second" rings false as the giggle of fatuity—the ideas are frequently shallow and the facts generally false. In Dante, if the ideas are sometimes profound and the emotions awful, they are also, as a rule, repugnant to our better feelings: the facts are the hoardings of a parish scold. In great poetry it is the formal music ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... that 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 for the simpler ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... particular sort of effects. But they are of one particular sort, and hence there must be some antecedent to account for this uniformity in their nature, and they could not have been brought forth by nonentity! Surely if anything can equal the fatuity of the hypothesis that nonentity can bring forth, or that a thing can produce itself, it is a serious attempt to refute it. How often, while poring over the works of necessitarians, are we lost in amazement at the logical mania which seems to have seized ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... was the dark, and solemn, and fanatical Dr. Grimshaw, her destined bridegroom, who really and truly loved the child to fatuity, and conscientiously did the very best he could for her mental and moral welfare, according to his light. Alas! "when the light that is in one is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Jacquelina rewarded his ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... 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 and ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... old simpleton! It's not his fault, after all, that he fancies himself a great little man. How are you to judge of the stature of mankind when men have forever addressed you on their knees? Peace and joy to his innocent fatuity! He believes himself the most rational of men; in fact, he's the most superstitious. He fancies himself a philosopher, an inquirer, a discoverer. He has not yet discovered that he is a humbug, that Theodore is ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... some of the dreadful scenes of St. Domingo." The next day Rutledge again warned the House against even discussing the matter, as "very serious, nay, dreadful effects, must be the inevitable consequence." He held up the most lurid pictures of the fatuity of the French Convention in listening to the overtures of the "three emissaries from St. Domingo," and thus yielding "one of the finest islands in the world" to "scenes which had never been practised since the destruction ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... 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 ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... sweep away for all but boys of special classical ability most kinds of composition. Fancy teaching a boy side by side with the elements of German or French to compose German and French verse, heroic, Alexandrine, or lyrical! The idea has only to be stated to show its fatuity. I would teach boys to write Latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish all Latin verse composition, and ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... the affair of Chatelard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid himself under her bed at Holyrood, and again at Burntisland. Mary had listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but Chatelard went too far. He was ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... return, Constance was no more. The army was not my original destination; but my mind began to be enfeebled by hourly musing upon one subject alone, without cessation or available termination; yet reason enough remained to convince me, that, without change and excitement, it would degenerate into fatuity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... 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 ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... a prison, or not; whether wholly naked and destitute, or not; whether with their reputations left to them, or not; and whether in time or eternity; experienced and honest guides rarely venture to predict. Was there ever such fatuity as that of a nation of men madly bent on building up such labyrinhs as these, for no other purpose than that of exposing all their rights of reputation, property, liberty, and life, to the hazards of being lost in them, instead ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... from which he had never returned. Raymond Warde had loved her for her beauty, which was real, and for her character, which was entirely the creation of his own imagination; and with the calm, unconscious fatuity which so often underlies the characters of honest and simple men, he had continued throughout his married life to believe that his wife's affection, if neither very deep nor very high, was centred upon himself and upon Gilbert. Any man a whit less true and straightforward ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... thought that grief might gar her quit, Her only son was lost at sea; But aff her wits behuved to flit An' leave her in fatuity. She threeps, an' threeps he 's livin' yet For a' the tellin' she can get; But catch the doited wife forget To ca' for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... symbolises and sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does not exaggerate the wit of the London street arab one atom more than Colonel Newcome, let us say, exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary soldier and gentleman, or than Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a certain kind of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous brotherhood of the poor lent a special seriousness and smell of reality to the whole story. The unconscious follies of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... did, or the Prince to act upon their counsels. He was in the heart of England; he was hard by the capital, which he would have to reach if he was ever to mount the throne of his fathers. He had a devoted army with him—it would seem as if he had only to advance and to win—and yet, with a fatuity which makes the student of history gasp, he actually resolved ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... this has lasting value. It enables us at any time to gauge the progress of enlightenment, to ascertain what real gain has been made, what is delusive, and what remains to be done that it is possible to do; for we must not expect the record of human fatuity to be closed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... generalizes with 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 virgin modesty, continence, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Equal in fatuity, almost 150 years later, were the several attempts at escape concerted on behalf of the French royal family. The abortive escape to Varennes is now familiarly known to all the world, and impeaches the good sense of the king himself not less than ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... partisan in the patriot and says not a word to weaken his own Government and hearten its opponents. To this height of self-denial Fox rarely rose; and the judgement alike of his fellows and of posterity has pronounced this speech a masterpiece of partisan invective and of political fatuity. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... possible, the stinging humiliation and anguish which every woman suffers, when the man whom she loves shows her that she fills only a subordinate and insignificant place in his affection; and yet, while her nobler nature commanded his homage, and the brilliancy of the alliance seems to jeer at his blind fatuity, his heart throbbed and yearned with an intolerable longing for one upon whom the world had set the seal ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... laughing to himself over the retreat of Bott, thinking with some paternal fatuity of the attractiveness and spirit of his daughter, when a shadow fell across him, and he ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... now presented by the representatives of Probinus, puts a somewhat different face upon the matter, and seems to show that the sale by Agapeta (notwithstanding her melancholy condition of fatuity and vice) was a bona fide one, for ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... 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
... 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 no longer ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... that if any part of Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII." is attributable to a lesser hand than his it may 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 immeasurably ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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 Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... 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 Tobias pause over ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Winterman from Howland Wade's ineptitude, or by the desire to see the latter abandon himself to the full shamelessness of its display; but of one fact he was blissfully assured—and that was of the existence in Winterman of some quality which would provoke Howland to the amplest exercise of his fatuity. "How he'll draw him—how he'll draw him!" Bernald chuckled, with a security the more unaccountable that his one glimpse of Winterman had shown the latter only as a passive subject for experimentation; ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony's funeral oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire's version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... to inform him that any violence attempted against the parties WHILE IN POSSESSION, although that possession was illegal, would, by a fatuity of the law, land him in the county jail. I said I would not hear ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... keep to the 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 up ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... flirt 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 in time to make a sketch from ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... 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 in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... public was 'romping in.' A hundred posters were required within an hour. He had nearly refused the order, in his feverish fatigue and his disgust, but some remnant of sagacity had asserted itself in him and saved him from this fatuity. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... had a high thought in him really though a most misguided one. Titular King of Men; but much bewildered into mere indolent fatuity, inane solemnity, high sniffing pride grounded on nothing at all; a Kaiser much sunk in the sediments of his muddy Epoch. Sure enough, he was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ironical exposures 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
... letter. Indeed it is a warfare I know not how to wage. The powers of positive vice I can in some degree calculate, and against direct malevolence I can be on my guard; but who can estimate the fatuity of giddy caprice, or ward off the unthinking mischief of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... grew furious with her 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 ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... to bring 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 ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... 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 ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 be thought ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... was away Harry had planned to accomplish mighty labors. With masculine fatuity he let himself believe—before she went away —that a man can get more work done with his goddess afar than when Cupid has a ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... 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
... 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
... 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
... sustaining hope for the future. Among many alleviations, there was one, which, (not wisely, but overcome by circumstances) all were willing to admit;—that the event was so strange and uncouth, exhibiting such discordant characteristics of innocent fatuity and enormous guilt, that it could not without violence be thought of as indicative of a general constitution of things, either in the country or the government; but that it was a kind of lusus naturae, in the moral world—a solitary straggler out of the circumference of Nature's law—a monster ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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
... 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
... France, even after Henry, with free consent of the Pope, had made his triumphal entry into Paris. He asserted complete and entire sovereignty over the Netherlands, even after Prince Maurice had won back from him the last square foot of Dutch territory. Such obstinacy as this can only be called fatuity. If Philip had lived in Pagan times, he would doubtless, like Caligula, have demanded ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... I am 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
... sent before the main conflict as a prototype and a warning. The Suitors looked on and saw the miserable beggar completely undone; "they threw up their hands and nearly died laughing;" a case of blind fatuity, for they were soon to be in the place of Irus, every one of them. A little later Telemachus suggests the connection: "Would that the Suitors might droop their heads overcome in our house, as now Irus sits at the hall gate with drooping head like a drunken ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... work was doing in England. The organization to sustain the colony represented adequate capital and the highest quality of character and influence. A royal charter, drawn with sagacious care to secure every privilege the Puritan Company desired, was secured from the fatuity of the reigning Stuart, erecting in the wilderness such a free commonwealth as his poor little soul abhorred; and preparation was made for sending out, in the spring of 1629, a noble fleet of six vessels, carrying ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... author has written here the biography of his book he has not acted on the prompting of fatuity. He relates facts which may furnish material for the history of human thought, and will without doubt explain the work itself. It may perhaps be important to certain anatomists of thought to be told that the soul ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... lacquer (Ah! And, parenthetically, pay my debts at bridge and baccarat). I dote on Futurism, and so a mate would give me little ease Whose views were strictly orthodox on MYRON and PRAXITELES. You do not understand," she sneered, "so gross is your fatuity; Well then, I answer 'No,' without ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... course, as I have often said before, he really accomplishes much less." The King had, moreover, recently committed the profound error of sending the Duchess Margaret of Parma to the Netherlands again. He had the fatuity to believe her memory so tenderly cherished in the provinces as to ensure a burst of loyalty at her reappearance, while the irritation which he thus created in the breast of her son he affected to disregard. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... personal superiority which had belonged to the men of Jena and Austerlitz, when in fact the French regiments of conscripts had ceased to be a match for equal numbers of the enemy. But no experience could alter Napoleon's fixed belief in the fatuity of all warfare except his own. After the havoc of Borodino, after the even struggles of Luetzen and Bautzen, he still reasoned as if he had before him the armies of Brunswick and Mack. His plan assumed the certainty of success in each of its parts; for the failure of a single operation ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... But the times were not propitious. There was commotion which soon ended in a long and bitter war. Even this need not have materially disturbed the family had not Kingsburgh precipitated himself into the conflict, needlessly and recklessly. With blind fatuity he took the wrong side in the controversy; and even then by the exercise of patience might have overcome the effects of his folly. Before Flora and her family were settled in America the storm gave its ominous rumble. When Governor Martin, who had deserted his post and fled to an armed ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... echo and sequel of Sir Toby, fitly serves the double purpose of a butt and a foil to the latter, at once drawing him out and setting him off. Ludicrously proud of the most petty, childish irregularities, which, however, his natural fatuity keeps him from acting, and barely suffers him to affect, on this point he reminds us of that impressive imbecility, Abraham Slender; yet not in such sort as to encroach at all on Slender's province. There can scarcely be found a richer piece of diversion ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... as he calls it, 'fitting house-pastimes.' 'I will not,' he says, 'agree in forbidding cards, dice, and other like games of Hazard,' and enters into an argument for his opinion, which is scarcely worth quoting. See Basilicon Doron—a prodigy of royal fatuity—but the perfect 'exponent' of the characteristics of the Stuart ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... 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 ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... the victim of some disease, which resisted many ordinary applications; but that all who used one medicine uniformly pronounced themselves cured:—would it be worthy of a philosopher not merely to neglect the remedy, but to traduce it? Such, however, my Lord, is the fatuity of your own conduct as to the religion of Christ. Thousands, as wretched as yourself, have found 'a Comforter' in Him; thousands, having stepped into these waters, have been healed of their disease; thousands, touching the hem of His garment, have found ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... irresolute, and restless, and even, at length, he began to throw out occasional hints tending to defend or extenuate the conduct of the very man whom, a few weeks before, he had so confidently denounced as a thief and a robber. Alarmed at these indications of returning weakness and fatuity in her husband, Mrs. Elwood soon put herself on inquiry, to ascertain the cause; and she was not long in making discoveries that more than justified her worst fears ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... folly, imbecility, miscalculation, senselessness, error, foolishness, imprudence, misjudgment, silliness, fatuity, idiocy, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... most consumedly at some of her articles, but on looking them over again—(she has kept the lot, pasted in a book—a monument to my fatuity!)—I don't think so much of them now I know she wrote them, and see that I could have made numberless valuable suggestions had she only seen fit to consult me! Of course I could stop any further contribution on her part, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... that he considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when he wrote Calvin on May 25, 1553: "I fear that avarice, that root ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... with that of his humans. Consider the decomposition of the moral life of Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer—a book which has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further than in The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor interior ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... porter and the other slaves and freedmen to be on the lookout 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 ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... 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 ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... of the 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 ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... pride of the Emperor Francis brooked no surrender of his Italian possessions, and again Wuermser was spurred on from Vienna to another invasion of Venetia. It would be tedious to give an account of Wuermser's second attempt, which belongs rather to the domain of political fatuity than that of military history. Colonel Graham states that the Austrian rank and file laughed at their generals, and bitterly complained that they were being led to the shambles, while the officers almost openly ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... songs were sung in that time, either by improvisation or inspiration, of which I have my opinion. I doubt not but that many were inspired by spirits congenial with themselves, and consequently some of the songs evinced a fatuity and simplicity peculiar to the instrument. On the other hand, many songs were given from spheres above, higher in melody, sentiment, and pathos than any ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... not certainly 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
... and useless slaughter of Fredericksburg. With the fatuity that characterized the earlier years of the war, the heroic army of the Potomac, which might have annihilated Lee on previous occasions, was hurled against heights and fortifications that, from the beginning, rendered ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... intellect is beneath the very 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 dead at the altar, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... me with being so, after all I have undergone—and with how little of that are you acquainted. You are perfectly correct in concluding that certain persons are laughing in their sleeve. But at what? At the success of their own machinations? Not at all! They are laughing at the inconceivable fatuity which induces those whom they once dreaded to destroy themselves and their own labours. The stone with immense toil is rolled up to the brow of the mountain, when they see it recoil, not at the touch of Jupiter but at the impulse ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... not share the social ambitions of the Lavilettes. He liked his political popularity, and he was only concerned for that. He had that touch of shrewdness to save him from fatuity where the Lavilettes were concerned. He was determined to associate with the ceremony all the primitive customs of the country. He had come of a race of simple farmers, and he was consistent enough to attempt to live up to the traditions of his people. He was entirely too good-natured to take ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... above the wild ravine of Stony Clove, in the Catskills—commemorates the sequel to an elopement from her tribe of an Indian girl and her lover. The parents and relatives had opposed the match with that fatal fatuity that appears to be characteristic of story-book Indians, and as soon as word of her flight came to the village they set off in chase. While hurrying through the tangled wood the young couple were separated and the girl found herself on the edge of the cliff. Farther advance was impossible. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... of thought.] Incogitancy. — N. incogitancy[obs3], vacancy, inunderstanding[obs3]; fatuity &c. 499; thoughtlessness &c. (inattention) 458; vacuity. couch potato, vegetable. V. not think &c. 451; not think of; dismiss from the mind, dismiss from the thoughts &c. 451. indulge in reverie &c. (be inattentive) 458. put away thought; unbend the mind, relax the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of his persistently in her ears, and how she had not been able to imagine herself leading the life it described. Now, in her travelling dress, pale and tired and subdued after the long journey, shorn of every grace of clothes and curls, she criticised her own fatuity in having held herself to be of too fine a clay, too delicate, too fragile, for a life that might be rough. "Oh, vain and foolish one!" she said aloud, apostrophising the figure in the glass with the familiar Du of the days before her mother died, "Art thou then ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Berlin, I should be reclaimed; and that I could not make the least preparation for departure without his being informed of it; for he knew, he said, every thing that passed in my house. In that respect he was a boaster, and, as the event has proved, exhibited mere fatuity in matters of espionnage. But who would not have been terrified at the tone of assurance with which he told all my friends that I could not move a step without being ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... about the gardens for an hour after the carriage had started for Windermere, revisiting every spot where she and her lover had walked together within the last three days, living over again the rapture of those hours, repeating to herself his words, recalling his looks, with the fatuity of a first girlish love. And yet amidst the silliness inseparable from love's young dream, there was a depth of true womanly feeling, thoughtful, unselfish, forecasting a future which was not to travel always along the primrose path of dalliance—a future ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 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 ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... voice a maiden, the orphan daughter of a noble Polygon, whose affection in former days he had sought in vain; and by a series of deceptions—aided, on the one side, by a string of lucky accidents too long to relate, and, on the other, by an almost inconceivable fatuity and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the bride—he succeeded in consummating the marriage. The unhappy girl committed suicide on discovering the fraud to which she ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... loneliness, a prey to the spectres of despair, or stupefied with excess of suffering, doomed as it were to a 'life in death,' to a consciousness of agonised existence, without the consciousness of power which should accompany it. Happily, death, or entire fatuity, at length puts an end to such scenes of ignoble misery; which, however, ignoble as they are, we ought to view with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... own 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 ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... leads, by a very obvious process, to hard-heartedness and the contempt of all moral influences. An exclusively moral education tends to fatuity by the over-excitement of the sensibilities. An exclusively religious education ends in insanity, if it do not take a directly opposite course and lead ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... was in the smoking-room, standing enormously in front of the fire, and for the first time the sense of his colossal fatuity struck Michael. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... we deserve.) How he splashes like leviathan in the seas of modern literature and 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 feudalism to-day in Great Britain—the increasing poverty ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of that 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... being deeper than another man, saw the fatuity of his labor. He turned to the court with a clownish gesture of the hands, expressive of his utter inability to ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... de Ferrieres might have forced itself even upon Nott's one-idead fatuity, had it not been a part of that gentleman's system delicately to look another way at that moment so as not to embarrass his adversary's calculation. "Pardon," stammered de Ferrieres, "but I do not comprehend!" He raised his hand to his head. "I am not well—I am stupid. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... o'clock this morning we met a steamer going down the coast, and, with the usual fatuity of steamships, she would not make up her mind which way to go until she was close to us, and then ran right across our bows. It is most extraordinary why steamships will not get out of the way of sailing-ships at night. The matter ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... who wean their children from it to stuff them with self-sufficiency, fatuity, and hunger! Let them get drowned in the throng! But thou, O my Provence, be not disturbed about the sons that disown thee and repudiate thy speech. They are dead, they are still-born children that survive, fed ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... is so easy, so natural, and so necessary, that it looks like fatuity to neglect the golden months of the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P'an K'u, who built the worlds; then, at about two and a 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
... 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 ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... to 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 work the brown ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... servitude 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
... 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, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... 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 demonstrating the strength in union. Varney ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... in his brilliant verses entitled "Gentlemen, Please Desist", exposes in a masterly way the fatuity of our loud-mouthed peace workers. Miss Silverman's lines on the same subject are very good, but scarcely equal in keenness of wit. It is all very well to "keep industry booming", but industry cannot take the place ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism. They saw beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they had but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson—I cannot deny that the book is didactic—of the change wrought by the comet is that man should find the full expression of his personality in sympathy and understanding. The egotism remains, but it ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... 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 in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... to follow all the intricacies of the ensuing "negotiations." The result was an utter fiasco, fully justifying the President's opinion of the fatuity of the whole business. The so-called Southern envoys had no credentials at all; they appeared to be mere adventurers, and members of that Southern colony in Canada which became even more infamous by what it desired to do than mischievous by what ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... 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 those who had ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Brittleback. I think that he was wrong, and I said so all through. But, heavens on earth—!" and instead of completing his speech Harold Smith turned away his head, and struck his hands together in token of his astonishment at the fatuity of the age. What he probably meant to express was this: that if such a good deed as that late appointment made at the Petty Bag Office were not held sufficient to atone for that other evil deed to which he had alluded, there ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
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