"Fatuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... character differentiating it from the emotion felt in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the generosity of Dr. Groschen in transferring his splendid collections of Greek inscriptions to the FitzTaylor Museum, I rejoiced; the next grant would be devoted to science, in consideration of the recently enriched galleries of the art and archaeological section. I only pitied the fatuity of the authorities for being grateful. Dr. Groschen now wound himself into everybody's good wishes, and the University degree was already conferred. He was offered a fine set of rooms in a college famous for culture. He became a well-known figure on the Q.P. But ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... all atheists. For at bottom, atheism is either a fad or a trade or a fatuity. And whether the one or the other, it is a sham more pernicious than the worst. To the young mind, it is a shibboleth of cheap culture; to the shrewd and calculating mind, to such orators as Khalid heard, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... gall, downright gall! Well, I didn't find it wormwood, and replied, with my untutored Redhorse heart in my throat, "I—I shall be pleased to do anything." Could words have been more stupid? There are depths of fatuity in me, friend o' my soul, that ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Manor is about to receive a second object-lesson upon the fatuity of trusting to individuals. Confident in Caesar's ability to take the ball at least within kicking distance of the base, they have rushed forward, leaving unguarded their own citadel. Caesar, going too fast, misjudges the distance between himself ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Quickley succeeds once more to entice the old fool. She orders him to another rendez-vous in the Park at midnight, and advises him to come in the disguise of Herne the black hunter. The others hear of the joke and all decide to punish him thoroughly for his fatuity. Ford, who has promised Dr. Cajus, to unite Anna to him the very night, tells him to wear a monk's garb, and also reveals to him, that Anna is to wear a white dress with roses. But his wife, overhearing this, frustrates his designs. She gives a black monk's garb to Fenton, while Anna chooses ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... admirable vent for gunpowder and its profitable sale; and since the savages must always be killing, it was manifestly best for all concerned that they should kill each other. He could not sufficiently deride the happy illustration which Governor Glen had given them (in his fatuity, Varney thought) of the values of peace and concord. In the presence of the two delegations the mediating Governor had taken an arrow and shown them with what ease it could be broken; then how impossible he found it to break a quiverful of arrows, thus ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... criminal class. It is also made up of the spirited—but the spirited who, having little shrewdness and no calculation—that is, no ability to foresee and measure consequences—wage clumsy war upon society and pay the penalty of their fatuity in lives of wretchedness even more wretched than the common lot. Gideon belonged to the second class—the class that pushes upward without getting into jail; he was a fair representative of this type, neither its best nor its worst, but about midway of its range between arrogant, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of the fatuity and recklessness and inconsistency of popular verdicts are wholesome enough in their degree in all societies, yet it has been, and still remains, a defect of some of the greatest French writers to expect a fruit from such performances which they can never bear. In the long run a great ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... orphan daughter of a noble Polygon, whose affection in former days he had sought in vain; and by a series of deceptions—aided, on the one side, by a string of lucky accidents too long to relate, and, on the other, by an almost inconceivable fatuity and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the bride—he succeeded in consummating the marriage. The unhappy girl committed suicide on discovering the fraud to which ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... knight-errant on quest; I may say I don't know that I ever felt prouder, old friend, of a conquest. And when I've been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing who knew it; I Thank my stars I'm as free from mock-modesty, friend, as from vulgar fatuity. I can't say if my spirit retains—for the subject appears to me misty—any tie To such associations as Poesy weaves round the records of Christianity. There are bards—I may be one myself—who delight in their skill to unlock a lip's Rosy secrets by kisses and whispers of texts ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that amounted to fatuity there seemed to be no watch kept on board the ships, and there were no lights visible. All was as still and silent as the grave. The Union was the next craft in line; she was a gunboat, and had already shewn herself capable of stinging pretty severely, ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... journal the revelations of an observer who was surprised to find that he had the power of reading, as they run, the revelations of the wire. I had the hope that he was about to explain to the public the more general use of this instrument,—which, with a stupid fatuity, the public has, as yet, failed to grasp. Because its signals have been first applied by means of electro-magnetism, and afterwards by means of the chemical power of electricity, the many-headed people refuses to avail itself, as it might do very easily, of the same signals, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... no interruption to his calculations, and the petit-maitre, in a tone of philosophic fatuity, asked, "Of the numbers of your English or Irish wives—all excellent—how many, I pray you, do you calculate are now married to the man they first, fell in love with, as they call it? My good sir, not five ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... tongue says, 'Listen, or be lost indeed!' Unskilled the fowler who his snare reveals: If at the bait I snatch—my doom is sealed: Too plain, too coarse, this web for any fly— Shall I this spider hail in my fatuity? His wrath is wrath arranged, his generous fire is nursed, That I, at Decius' hand, may meet the doom accurst, If I should pardon grant—that grace my crime would be, For he the spoil would reap of my credulity. No simpleton ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... with the recent protest from military men in the Spectator about the "Military Babu," who is occupying an ever larger and larger place in the life of the Army. There will be a revolt one of these days against the fatuity of this eternal filling up of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... then the frequency of its use; but, as is generally the case, he put off the beginning of sturdy self-denial until the morrow, and almost every day he poisoned his system with that which also poisoned and demoralized his soul. He dimly saw his danger, but did not realize it. With the fatuity of all self-indulgent natures he thought the day would come when, with better prospects and health renewed, he would throw away the spell which bound him and become a free man, but day after day passed and he did not; his appetite began to flag ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... gospel," but when he furiously retorted that he considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when he wrote Calvin ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved 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 ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... with a strange fatuity, left him to superintend sundry alterations in his house at Heimersleben, arranging for him meanwhile to read classics with the resident clergyman, Rev. Dr. Nagel. Being thus for a time his own master, temptation opened wide doors before him. He was ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidences of our wisdom. We are so self-satisfied with our own customs, that we hold up our hands with surprise at the fatuity of men who presume to point out to us their defects. Those practices in which we most widely depart from the broad and recognised morality of all civilised ages and countries are to us the Palladiums of our ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... alleviations, there was one, which, (not wisely, but overcome by circumstances) all were willing to admit;—that the event was so strange and uncouth, exhibiting such discordant characteristics of innocent fatuity and enormous guilt, that it could not without violence be thought of as indicative of a general constitution of things, either in the country or the government; but that it was a kind of lusus naturae, in the moral world—a solitary straggler out of the circumference of Nature's law—a monster ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is—a singular compliment to the "Master Workman"—he executes a volte-face and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary "sins," Determinism would simply ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... with two or three gaudily-dressed negresses, who showed their white teeth and their black muzzles from the doors of the casernes, and to laugh at the chaplain of the garrison, for such I conclude was the grade of the old priest, who met us, toddling about in a state of drunken fatuity, very much resembling the condition of Obadiah in the Committee, with a nose exhibiting the visible effects of a fight or a fall. Having escaped at last from the good man's persecuting attentions, we got back to Cannes ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... what it says, is worth a little talk: the Heroism and Patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the breasts of Nature; and already poisoned by O'Connellism and the Old Irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one knows not what. Very sad to see. On the whole, no man ought, for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with lies; but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is the meaning of a tongue, people used to know!—Ireland ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... clumsiness, ill-breeding, stupidity, boorishness, fatuity, ill manners, unmannerliness, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... came would insure disaster. Fatuous self-complacency or vanity, or short-sightedness in refusing to prepare for danger, is both foolish and wicked in such a nation as ours; and past experience has shown that such fatuity in refusing to recognize or prepare for any crisis in advance is usually succeeded by a mad panic of hysterical fear once ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... studied him attentively whilst he was at breakfast. Having done so, not a single doubt remains me of our success. As for what he looks like, I could entertain you at length upon the fashion in which nature has designed his gross fatuity. But that is no matter. We are concerned with what he is, with the wit of him. And I tell you confidently that I find him so dull and stupid that you may be confident he will tumble headlong into each and all of the traps I have so ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... 'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say, of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had (as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly assuaged their vague regrets. It was not ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... brought us to New York together were not nearly so frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving the reasons why he thought himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... revelations of an observer who was surprised to find that he had the power of reading, as they run, the revelations of the wire. I had the hope that he was about to explain to the public the more general use of this instrument,—which, with a stupid fatuity, the public has as yet failed to grasp. Because its signals have been first applied by means of electro-magnetism, and afterwards by means of the chemical power of electricity, the many-headed people ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... the vein, "the agitations of his mind and body" were an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard. We can well believe ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... latter an English historian [Footnote: Lord Macaulay. Nor was much, if any, more to be hoped for from Pitt, afterwards first Earl of Chatham.] has said that his selfish ambition "was so intense a passion, that it supplied the place of talents and inspired even fatuity with cunning." Not under such auspices was the Episcopate to be given ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... spectacles of anguish and risks of infection? How could she guess that such women are the spiritual sisters of poor heathen and savage Hottentot and Malay mothers and daughters, who, sooner than be burdened with the wailing helplessness of infancy and the mumbling fatuity of age, will expose the children dependent on these murderesses, and the hoary heads that once planned and prayed for the welfare of their slayers, to perish ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... indescribable mixture of imbecility and enthusiasm, as though the spirit of some Eastern fakir had reanimated a living body. A gleam of almost supernatural intelligence was mingled with an expression of fatuity, that in less enlightened ages would have invested him with the dangerous reputation of priest or prophet in ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... be profound insight, and it might be profound fatuity. Rowland turned away; he could not ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... the town a gap broken in a fence admits to a long field on a hillside. The entrance is perilous, and before it is achieved may involve more than one headlong flight to the safe summit of a friendly wall, as the young horses protest, and whirl, and buck with the usual fatuity of their kind. Once within the fair field there befal the enticements of the green apple, of the dark-complexioned sweetmeat temptingly denominated "Peggy's leg," of the "crackers"—that is, a confection resembling dog biscuit sown ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Cornelia still protested; but the reasons why she could not, seemed to have escaped her, or to have turned into mere excuses. In fact, since Charmian had proposed it, and seemed to wish it, they were really no longer reasons. Cornelia alleged them again with a sense of their fatuity. She did not finally assent; she did not finally refuse; but she felt that she was ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... excitement and progress of popular feeling; but the scorn of all serious and monitory predictions of its ultimate result was at all events to be kept up,—in whatever proportions a time-serving interest and an honest fatuity might share in dictating this elated and contemptuous style. Should the latter of these ingredients at present predominate in the temper which throws off the fume of this high style, it will not leave much faculty in the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... quarter million years before Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One. All this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at least that—the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the West, with our creation ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... last extreme of luxury, that at moments he felt as uncomfortable as a dreaming man who knows that he is asleep. And yet, he looked round at the fair reality about him with a confidence to which envious minds might have given the name of fatuity. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... years and the consequences of her folly should have taught her when it would be too late. Why Eleanor, if she wished to throw herself away, should pitch upon the South Seas for the place of her retirement, was a piece of the same mysterious fatuity which marked the whole proceeding. Why she could think of no pleasanter wedding journey than a voyage of twelve thousand miles in search of a husband, was but another incomprehensible point. Mrs. Powle had a curiosity to know what Eleanor expected to live upon out there, where she ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... 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
... right: "Mozart and Haydn you will do the honor not to mention"; at the left: "It was decided yesterday, and even before, that you were not to write for me any more." On another spot he writes: "correct your blunders that occur through your fatuity, presumption, ignorance and foolishness." (Unwissenheit, Uebermuth, Eigenduenkel, und Dummheit). "That will become you better than to try to ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... Franco-German war. He was now representing the New York Herald, and had just returned from Estella, at the taking of which place, the most important the Carlists had yet seized, he had the luck to be present. He assured me that it was utter fatuity to dream of following the Carlists, except I had at least one horse—but that it would be sensible to take two if I could manage to procure them. It was more than an ordinary man was qualified to cope with, to make his observations, write his letters, and look after their transmission, without ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... desperate, but themselves. Some of the Bible defences thrown around slavery by ministers of the Gospel, do so torture common sense, Scripture, and historical fact, that it were hard to tell whether absurdity, fatuity, ignorance, or blasphemy, predominates, in compound. Each strives so lustily for the mastery, it may be ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... think where he had put the matches, and remembered there were some on the widow-sill. The room was so dark that he could not see the foot of the bed, and in his fatuity he had barricaded himself in the room with the loathsome reptile which was to ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... the adventurer surprised Prince Victor, morosely ambling by, in his vast fatuity no doubt imagining that his passage through Halfmoon Street would go unremarked in the dusk of that early winter evening. He wasn't at all pleased to find himself mistaken; and though Lanyard did his best with his blandest smile to make amends for having discomfited ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... I find my eyes wet with tears, for the beauty and the glory and the insidious danger of that intoxicating war-cry; for the blindness and the wickedness and the selfish greed that lurk behind it, exploiting the generous emotions of the young and brave; for the irony and bitter fatuity of any war-cry in a world that should be purged ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... at Rouletabile, who turned as red as the comb of a rooster and was rather embarrassed at his fatuity. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... railway station, as of old at the city gates, the fatuity of human aspirations may be studied advantageously. Soldiers were there, at Victoria, hundreds of them, lined up on a distant platform, and they symbolised the spirit of an age which exalts Mechanism to the pinnacle of a deity ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... and as for him, he was almost confused in spite of the assurance which is like a matter of costume for a diplomatist. But not for long. The Marquise took refuge at once in the friendliness of manner which women use as a defence against the misinterpretations of fatuity, a manner which admits of no afterthought, while it paves the way to sentiment (to make use of a figure of speech), tempering the transition through the ordinary forms of politeness. In this ambiguous ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... find a wife for. I'm neither fish nor flesh. I've no country, no career, no future; I offer nothing; I bring nothing. What position under the sun do I confer? There's a fatuity in our talking as if we could make grand terms. You and the others are well enough: qui prend mari prend pays, and you've names about which your husbands take a great stand. But ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mohammed, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... Consul's preference of him. But I am far from concurring in what has been asserted by many persons, that France lost Egypt at the very moment when it seemed most easy of preservation. Egypt was conquered by a genius of vast intelligence, great capacity, and profound military science. Fatuity, stupidity, and incapacity lost it. What was the result of that memorable expedition? The destruction of one of our finest armies; the loss of some of our best generals; the annihilation of our navy; the surrender of Malta; and the sovereignty ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... monopoly of slave- hunting for the Spanish colonies and an opening for contraband trade. In the river Plate region, where the dissensions of Spaniards and Portuguese afforded another opening, English traders smuggled. The Spaniards, with monstrous fatuity, refused to make use of the superb waterways provided by the Parana and Paraguay, and endeavoured to stifle all trade. England's main struggle was with France. It was prolonged by her entanglement in European ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments. Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a dozen times. And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... returned the Doctor, with sublime fatuity, "I read your thoughts! Nor am I surprised—your education is not yet complete; the higher duties of men have not been yet presented to you fully. A hint—till we have leisure—must suffice. Now that I am once more in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me the printed form which he had filled in. In spite of my misery I almost laughed at the fatuity of the man in thinking that those mere unimaginative statistics applicable to five hundred thousand young females in London, could ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... This play is in the graver part elegant and easy, and in some of the lighter scenes exquisitely humorous. Ague—cheek is drawn with great propriety, but his character is, in a great measure, that of natural fatuity, and is therefore not the proper prey of a satirist. The soliloquy of Malvolio is truly comic; he is betrayed to ridicule merely by his pride. The marriage of Olivia, and the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contrived to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and fails ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... Tavistock, and lovingly described them in his verse. Frequently he indulges in descriptions of sunrise and sunset; they leave no vivid impression, but charm the reader by their quiet beauty. It cannot be denied that his fondness for simple, homely images sometimes led him into sheer fatuity; and candid admirers must also admit that, despite his study of simplicity, he could not refrain from hunting (as the manner was) after ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... disposed to gauge Shelby's vogue with the groundlings as greater than before, and lamented it to Bernard Graves, who fell wholly into his mood for once and deplored the fatuity of ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application of satire, and too humble for the incitement ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... significantly: "With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally from both races." After this truthful testimony, which Pelion upon Ossa of evidence has confirmed, does Mr. Froude, in the fatuity of his skin-pride, believe that educated men, worthy of the name, would be otherwise than resentful, if not disgusted, at being shunted out of bread in their own native land, which their parents' labours and taxes have made desirable, in order to afford room to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... things, the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be explicit as to his whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... thing to like you for—your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many." He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase. ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... into her arms, God makes her the love-magistrate of the family; and her instincts and moral nature fit her to adjudicate questions of weakness and want. And when society is on the eve of adjudicating such questions as these, it is a monstrous fatuity to exclude from them the very ones that, by nature, and training, and instinct, are best fitted ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... world has yet seen. The biolog personates an individual type, like an aberration of human nature, which may be found anywhere and at any time. The etholog personates a specimen of a class which helps to characterize a period. Dandies exist at all times, but vary in detail. The fatuity and vanity of all dandies are features for the etholog; the follies of the dandy of a period belong to the biolog. Beau Brummel would be a model for a biolog. The etholog is apt to overlook his best subjects. He cannot himself escape from his own times enough to recognize them. He never satirizes ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations! May your very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... thing, or that he might have guarded against being forced to act in such a manner. And it is desirable to prove by definitions that this conduct of his ought not to be called imprudence, or accident, or necessity, but indolence, indifference, or fatuity. ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her—he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... its opponents. To this height of self-denial Fox rarely rose; and the judgement alike of his fellows and of posterity has pronounced this speech a masterpiece of partisan invective and of political fatuity. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... later. But they've not got off—they're not getting off. When I see them—and I saw them this morning—they have showy reasons. They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl brought out: "They've postponed it for you." He protested so far as a man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind. She wants not to miss you—though she wants also not to show she wants you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... scruples of the Catholics, while the real nomination remained with the Crown. But, as I have before said, the moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... politics! Doubtless, respecting the latter, one needs first to realize, from actual observation, the squalor, vice and doggedness ingrain'd in the bulk-population of the British islands, with the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkeyism everywhere, to understand the last meaning in his pages. Accordingly, though he was no chartist or radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most indignant comment or protest anent the fruits of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece into freshness of fatuity, he would not always smile so complacently in the thoughts of the little learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate sphere. And if every man, who has the interest of Art and of History at heart, would at once devote himself earnestly—not to enrich his own collection—not ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... feel the better rather than the worse for it; but to care for that which our care cannot touch, and to be troubled about that which is entirely beyond our sphere—this is the burden that breaks the back of the world—this is the burden which we bind to our shoulders with obstinate fatuity. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... as an arch-simpleton among nations. Its vanity is stupendous, eclipsing all previously known vanities. The Great General Staff must know fairly well how matters stand, and yet not the mere ignorant public, but the King of Bavaria himself, had the fatuity as late as last week to talk about the new territory that Germany would annex as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... probably never be able to give women any real freedom because there were the children to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the end of the book, he complained that all the babies were being had by the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible to ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... here the biography of his book he has not acted on the prompting of fatuity. He relates facts which may furnish material for the history of human thought, and will without doubt explain the work itself. It may perhaps be important to certain anatomists of thought to be told that the soul is feminine. Thus although the author made a resolution ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... now at liberty to believe, without too much fatuity, that you love another," said the young man, in a caressing tone, "and I repeat that I am really interested ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... case the axiom seemed, after the manner of all general rules, to bulwark itself with an exception. Colonel Musgrave continued to emanate an air of contentment which fell perilously short of fatuity; and that Patricia was honestly fond of him was evident to the most impecunious of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... not been able to imagine herself leading the life it described. Now, in her travelling dress, pale and tired and subdued after the long journey, shorn of every grace of clothes and curls, she criticised her own fatuity in having held herself to be of too fine a clay, too delicate, too fragile, for a life that might be rough. "Oh, vain and foolish one!" she said aloud, apostrophising the figure in the glass with the familiar Du of the days before her ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... an hour to recover my quiet mind. After all, it is as idle to rage against man's fatuity as to hope that he will ever be less a fool. For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle. Why, I have known the day when it would have been beyond my power altogether, or else would have cost me a meal. Wherefore, let me again ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... is willing to confess himself very intimately acquainted, and, therefore, its pains and pleasures are kept secret. But what the author says of its happiness, seems applicable only to fatuity, or gross dulness; for that inferiority of understanding, which makes one man, without any other reason, the slave, or tool, or property of another, which makes him sometimes useless, and sometimes ridiculous, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... the future was certain,—Nathan Griggs should not escape altogether scathless. For a long time Birt sat motionless, revolving vengeful purposes in his mind. Every moment he grew more bitter, as he reflected upon his wrecked scheme, his wonderful fatuity, and the double dealing of his chosen coadjutor. But he would get even with Nate Griggs yet; he promised ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... to be played that evening: all this has been done. I cannot give you much of Boursoufle [done by one Vanture]. Mademoiselle Piggery [DE LA COCHONNIERE, Madame du Chatelet herself] executed so perfectly the extravagance of her part, that I own it gave me real pleasure. But Vanture only put his own fatuity into the character of Boursoufle, which wanted more: he played naturally in a Piece where all requires to be forced, like the subject of it."—What a pity none of us has read this fine Farce! "One Paris did the part of MUSCADIN ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... time to collect or read them." And yet seeing what may be done in this regard by care and system, and that the greatest readers have been the busiest men, it seems strange that persons of intelligence should thus express themselves; should admit such obvious fatuity of view ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... is not shown by many savage races—they yet allow house-flies to swarm in their dwellings, to run about and sample their food, with an indifference which is, when the truth is known, truly horrible in its fatuity and foolhardiness. For the fact is that the feet and proboscis of the common house-fly are covered with microbes of all sorts, picked up by his explorations upon every kind of filth. At every step which he takes he plants a few dozen microbes, which include ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... idiotic thing which is made up of the admiration of the fools, the approbation of the knaves, and the concert of all interested vanities. When they pass, their horses at full trot, their carriage raising a cloud of dust, insolent, impudent, swelled with the vulgar fatuity of wealth, people bow to the ground, and say, 'Those are smart fellows!' And in fact, yes, by skill or luck, they have hitherto avoided the police-courts where so many others have come to grief. Those who despise them fear them, and shake hands with them. Moreover, they are rich enough not ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed singularly diminished. It was, in fact, that which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... lack of reserve, her indelicacy. Her good-natured laughter with the men who crowded about her familiarly was a kind of disloyalty. She seemed at times to be exchanging doubtful jests with them; and at last, to protect her from the results of her own fatuity, he danced with her himself—danced almost incessantly, notwithstanding the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... psalters or missals; no declamation upon the boldness of Luther could impress thinking young men as did citations from his "Erfurt Sermon,'' which, by weakening his safe-conduct, put him virtually at the mercy of his enemies at the Diet of Worms; no statements as to the fatuity of Robespierre could equal citations from an original copy of his "Report on the Moral and Religious Considerations which Ought to Govern the Republic''; all specifications of the folly of Marat paled before the ravings in the original ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... thinks about them. And that makes it very fortunate that the term of the President is limited, because no president could stand it for a number of years. But when the lid is off, I am going to resume my study of the dictionary to find adequate terms in which to describe the fatuity of these gentlemen with their poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere. I cannot express my contempt for their intelligence, but because I think I know the people of the United States, I can ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... alluring and yet illusive of all the phenomena presented by civilization is that which we have been considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest prescience when advancing along the curve which has led it to ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the descent ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... which brought them together was an agreement entered into some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... collision, or at least to postpone it to a period beyond the close of his official term. The management of the whole affair was what Talleyrand describes as something worse than a crime—a blunder. Whatever treatment the case demanded, should have been prompt; to wait was fatuity. ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the carriage-folk, the man who had put it up had sought the Kingdom himself, and had, if all was true, found it. Joe Longstaffe was by common consent a Christian man, and not of that too general kind which excuses its foolishness and fatuity on the ground of its religion. The Duke's agent disliked him for political reasons, but he would admit that the dissenter was the best farmer in the countryside; and the labourers would have added that he was also ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... hyperbole. But it was obvious from the stir of officialdom that the signer of the demand wanted his daughter very much and was accustomed to having his wants respectfully carried out. One feature of the message would have convinced the Tyro, had he seen it, of the fatuity of fatherhood. It described the fugitive ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mouth of Pemaquid River. It was a quadrangle, with ramparts of rough stone, built at great pains and cost, but exposed to artillery, and incapable of resisting heavy shot. The government of Massachusetts, with its usual military fatuity, had placed it in the keeping of an unfit commander, and permitted some of the yeoman garrison to bring their wives and children to this ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... folly, the fatuity of what we had done, oppressed me like an iron band around the skull. Common sense told me that the man who had decoyed us into Chinatown would not be satisfied with robbery. And what were the lives of two "white devils" to the owner of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... in Paris whose talent is worthy of admiration, and whose caprices might amuse us if we had time to dwell upon them. There is, however, a grande couturiere who surpasses all her masculine rivals in fatuity and caprice, namely, Madame Rodrigues, the great theatrical dress-maker. Madame Rodrigues always asks the journalists not to mention her by name. "Put simply," she says, "the first dress-maker in Paris. Everybody will know who is meant." This lady regards herself as the collaborator ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... against loan-money, and what arguments they had used, this person was to be charged in his majesty's name, and upon his allegiance, not to disclose to any other the answer he had given. A striking instance of that fatuity of the human mind, when a weak government is trying to do what it knows not how to perform: it was seeking to obtain a secret purpose by the most open and general means: a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... rose-leaves had been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage, while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin—a process which resulted ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to complete the ruin of their country. They might do it in six months; yes, he would venture to say, or even in three months; but he gave them at most a year. Favourable accidents, against which even the blind fatuity and garrulous pig-headedness of septuagenarian senility could not prevail might prolong the struggle; but the day of doom was inevitable, unless—and so on, and so on, with a running commentary by ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... been annihilated, and James VIII. proclaimed at the Cross of Edinburgh. Well did the brave Highlanders indignantly demand, 'What did you call us to arms for? Was it to run away? What did our own King come for? Was it to see us butchered by hangmen?' There was a fatuity that accompanied all their undertakings which neutralised intrepidity, devotedness, and bravery which the annals of no other people can exhibit, and paltry jealousies which stultified exertions, which, independently of political results, astonished ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... their way in the religious ceremonies, even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity immediately after. The natives and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus not to waste time over such fatuity. [36] ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... and intriguing bustle of Naples, he retired, at the early age of 34, to his natal village of Macchia, throwing over one or two offers of lucrative worldly appointments. He describes himself as wholly disenchanted with the "facile fatuity" of Liberalism, the fact being, that he lacked what a French psychologist has called the function of the real; his temperament was not of the kind to cope with actualities. This retirement is an epoch in his life—it is the Grand Renunciation. Henceforward ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... their forerunner, and still called him a quack while adopting his quackery. This dishonesty led them into difficulties. To hide that their whole practice in medicine was reversed on better information, they went from shuffle to shuffle, till at last they reached this climax of fatuity and egotism—THE TYPE OF DISEASE ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... not know that it was written to pass the time by one who had ruled this great empire for years, and who within a few years more was destined to rule it again. It was a fanciful and almost sympathetic satire on the selfish fatuity of the noble, wealthy, and governing orders of British society. But then the author of this burlesque was himself about to ask these orders to admit him to their select ranks, and to enthrone him as ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... more sober, less en l'air, less coquette, less taken by show, less prone to set an undue value on outside excellence—to make much of the attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature, des couleurs de poupee, un nez plus ou moins bien fait, and an enormous amount of fatuity—I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an exemplary character. But, as it was——And here the little man's voice ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... but he will think none the worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself; and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... hope of it. It is a case of confirmed fatuity I believe. If you like to see him again, you shall accompany me to-morrow when I visit him. What a strange life is this, Stukely! What a strange history may be that of this poor fellow whom Providence has cast at our door! Well, poor wretch, we'll do the best we can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... breaches of the pebble ridge. And the risk of a heavy sea boarding us was fearfully multiplied by having thus to cross the storm instead of breasting it. Useless and helpless, and only in the way, and battered about by wind and sea, so that my Sunday dress was become a drag, what folly, what fatuity, what frenzy, I might call it, could ever have led me to jump into that boat? "I don't know. I only know that I always do it," said my sensible self to its mad sister, as they both shut their eyes at a great white wave. "If I possibly survive, I will try to know better. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... centuries up to the time of Louis XIV.; but it is said that there were such men at the Court of Louis le Debonnaire. Giraldus Cambrenses writes that when he was preaching for the Crusades in South Wales, one John Spang "who by simulating fatuity, and having a quick tongue was wont to be a great comfort to the court," said to Resus, the king: "You should be greatly indebted to your relative the Archdeacon for sending a hundred of your men to day to follow Christ, and if he had spoken Welsh ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of London Nina had one acquaintance, and an hour or so later, after drinking some tea, she set forth to visit this acquaintance. The weight of her own foolishness, fatuity, silliness, and ignorance was heavy upon her. And, moreover, she had been told that Mr. Lionel Belmont had already departed back to America, his luggage being marked for the ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... suffers, when the man whom she loves shows her that she fills only a subordinate and insignificant place in his affection; and yet, while her nobler nature commanded his homage, and the brilliancy of the alliance seems to jeer at his blind fatuity, his heart throbbed and yearned with an intolerable longing for one upon whom the world had set the seal ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... nature, but how do I know what he means by that? Furthermore, it keeps him from home, while I have to stay at home and be entertained by my sons, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightly calls dull and fatuous. In other words, club life for him, and dulness and fatuity for me." ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... as he spoke pointedly to the Queen on the subject, who pretended only to have contemplated the ridiculous side of her new adorer's gallantries. But when Jarze next made his appearance in her cabinet, she rated him roundly before the whole Court upon his absurd fatuity, and forbade him ever to enter her presence again. The Prince de Conde, pretending to feel hurt at the affront put upon Jarze, early next morning paid the Prime Minister a visit, and insolently demanded that Jarze should be received ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... be ready for head-way when required. While thus prepared, in 1842 my excellent and highly accomplished friend was most unexpectedly assailed by an afflicting malady, which at once reduced a brilliant mind to a distressing fatuity, which—after two lingering years—closed his valuable life, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... truths that you have never learned," he persisted, "the fatuity of mere bravado, the uses of life. You couldn't play with it if you knew something ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... grant the proposition that there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I could see that from this moment he would be filled with a passionate pity ever so little qualified by a sense of the girl's fatuity and folly. She was always accessible to him—that I knew; for if she had told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have resented the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... exigencies of hypocrisy, which he would put on if he could. His infamy, his profligacy, can proceed even from no perverted energy of character, and must therefore be associated with contempt. There is a lively fatuity about him that is uniformly a symptom of imbecility. Among women, at least, it is so, and I have no doubt but it is the same with men. Alice, I know what my fate will be. It is true, you may see me married to him; but you will see me drop ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer—a book which has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further than in The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... history has heard of Garrick's contest with Madam Clairon, and the triumph which the English Roscius achieved over the Siddons of the French stage, by his representation of the father struck with fatuity on beholding his only infant child dashed to pieces by leaping in its joy from his arms: perhaps the sole remaining conquest for histrionic tragedy is somewhere in the unexplored regions of the mind, below the ordinary understanding, amidst the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... 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
... it. If it be thus criminal, dangerous, and fatal; and if it be possible to devise means of freeing ourselves from it, we ought at once to set about the employing of those means. It would be the most wretched and imbecile fatuity, to shut our eyes to the impending dangers and horrors, and "drive darkling down the current of our fate," till we are overwhelmed in the final destruction. If we are tyrants, cruel, unjust, oppressive, let us humble ourselves and repent in the sight of heaven, that the foul ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of the New Testament read, by some strange fatuity, touches also the despair of the city. It told of Christ betrayed by Iscariot, deserted by his disciples, saying to his few trusty ones: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad." ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... not the business of this letter. Indeed it is a warfare I know not how to wage. The powers of positive vice I can in some degree calculate, and against direct malevolence I can be on my guard; but who can estimate the fatuity of giddy caprice, or ward off the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... shell, two things gave me a shock of intense surprise. First, I could not conceive how the Catholic Church had got on for eighteen hundred years without my cooperation and ability; and, secondly, I could not understand what fatuity possessed the Bishop to appoint as his vicar-general a feeble old man of seventy, who preached with hesitation, and, it was whispered, believed the world was flat, and that people were only joking when they spoke of it as a globe; and pass over such a paragon of perfection, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... for suspicious characters, and had let just enough of the plot—as it was known to him—leak out, to put all the household on the qui vive to apprehend any would-be assassin of their beloved young master. But with that fatuity which often ruins the plans of "mice and men," he had failed to inform even his subordinate Falto of the likelihood of Agias arriving from Rome. It had obviously been desirable that it should not be bruited among the servants that Cornelia and Drusus were still communicating, and ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... fatuity Geoffrey, if he had followed his impulse, would have flung McVay back in the closet and locked the door. ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... of the nobles.] As the petty acts of the nobles had brought out into relief the large policy of Tiberius, so it was now. They resorted to even lower tricks than accusations of tyranny, and found in the fatuity or dishonesty of Drusus a tool even more effective than Nasica's brutality. The plantation of a colony at Carthage was looked at askance by many Romans. It was the first colony planted out of Italy, and the superstitious ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... 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 scrap-iron; and towards midnight these floating hell-boats slipped their moorings and drifted ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... different sides of the man are hard to reconcile. Now he seemed frank and honest; again subtle and insincere. As an active politician in the narrow sense, he should have been sagacious and astute, yet he displayed at the crisis of his life the most absolute fatuity. At times he had a buoyant and puerile way of disregarding fact and enveloping himself in a world of his own imagining. He could bluster, when he wished, like any demagogue; and yet he could be persuasive, agreeable, and even ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... been ever so well disposed towards being made technically an honest woman by her betrayer of auld lang syne, this declaration of his motives might easily have hardened her heart against him. What fatuity of affection could have survived it? Yet his candour was probably his only redeeming feature. He was scarcely an invariable hypocrite; he was merely heartless, sensual, and cruel to the full extent of man's possibilities. Nevertheless, he could and would have lied black white with a purpose. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... replied the other with an adorable fatuity. "You are not yet accustomed to it; but, never mind, one quickly becomes so. See how after a single month I find myself at ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
