"Fatuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was the first to see that the boy was something more than brilliant. Hamilton had accepted his son's cleverness as a matter of course, and Rachael, having a keen contempt for fatuous mothers, hardly had dared admit to herself that her son was to other boys as a star to pebbles. When Knox, who had undertaken his education at once, assured her that he must distinguish himself if he lived, probably in letters, life felt almost fresh again, although ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... paper money with me was never wholly absent from my mind. It loomed as a badge of omnipotence. I felt in the presence of Luck, which was a living spirit, a goddess. I was mostly grave. The frivolities of the other men in the factory seemed so fatuous, so revolting. A great sense of security and self-confidence swelled my heart. When I walked through the American streets I would feel at home in them, far more so than I had ever felt before. At the same time danger was constantly hovering ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... kitchen-folk at Bruggabrong, and the anecdotes of African hunting, travel, and society life which had often formed our guests' subject of conversation, this endless fiddle-faddle of the price of farm produce and the state of crops was very fatuous. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... that though Kaisers, Emperors, Crown Princes, and Archdukes may be the accidental instruments of invisible powers in plunging humanity into seas of blood, a war is no sooner declared by any of them, however feeble or fatuous, than all the nations concerned make it their own. That was what happened in Central Europe the moment Austria declared war on Serbia, and the history of man on this planet has no record of anything more pitiful than the spectacle of Germany—"sincere, calm, deep-thinking ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... irresistible in the eyes of the fair. Readers of modern French fiction are aware that the heroes of those edifying tales invariably wear the mustache "hardiment retroussee," which habit doubtless adds a subtle charm to their singularly puerile and fatuous conversation imperceptible to ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... having been properly sealed, Lombard said, with a countenance curiously divided between a tragical expression and a smile of fatuous complacency, "There was a clear case of poetical justice in your being left behind in the desert to-night. To see the lights of the train disappearing, leaving you alone in the midst of desolation, gave you a touch of my feeling on being rejected this afternoon. Of all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Hammond, earnest enough, kind enough in her own intentions; but she had been almost imperious—a woman habitually, proudly used to being obeyed. She divined that all the pride, blue blood, wealth, culture, distinction, all the impersonal condescending persuasion, all the fatuous philanthropy on earth would not avail to turn this man a single hair's-breadth from his downward career to destruction. Her coming had terribly augmented his bitter hate of himself. She was going to fail to help him. She experienced a sensation ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... swag around him. It was neatly arranged in bags, for in spite of his madness he was a most methodical man. One bag was labelled silverware; another, jewels; another, cash; and another, souvenirs. There was blood on his hands and a fatuous smile on ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... all others she would be happiest in hearing of my good fortune. With my mind made up to face boldly this bad situation, I could not crush the consoling hope that in hearing she would give some sign of the pain of the wound that I was making. What a fatuous illusion! In her presence, in an environment which made that which I planned for myself seem so narrow and commonplace, she became a spirit thoroughly alien. I could as easily have talked to some foreign princess of the blood of Mr. Pound or Stacy Shunk. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... attempted was that every staff officer on Majuba felt certain "that the Boers would never face the hill—entrenchments or no entrenchments on the summit—as long as the British soldier was there." For this almost fatuous belief in their own security these gallant soldiers were ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the south pole, and very little in the invention of aeroplanes; while gramophones, machine guns, advertisements, cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts, cosmopolitan hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous. But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the spirit of adventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It is not the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anything but pernicious, for its main ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of sun systems, visible in the telescopic field, is not stationary, but is revolving with inconceivable rapidity about some unknown and infinitely remote centre of the universe, how immeasurably vast does the conception become, and how unutterably puerile and fatuous the thought of Mr. Darwin's little whirligig as the author of it all! No wonder the inspired Psalmist exclaims; "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." But listen to the Darwinian exclamation: "The heavens declare the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... "fictionised" in nearly the best manner, though with the author's usual fault of inability to "round out" character. We do not sufficiently realise the poet himself. But his brother, Marie-Joseph, requiring slighter presentment, has it; and so, on a still smaller scale, has the well-meaning but fatuous father, who, hopelessly misunderstanding the signs of the times, actually precipitates his elder son's fate by applying, in spite of remonstrance, to the tiger-pole-cat Robespierre for mercy. The scene where this happens—and where the "sea-green incorruptible" himself, Saint-Just ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... much more physical pleasure and power without it. The day of alcohol is past, with intelligent people. Science has condemned it as a food. Business has banned it. It remains only as the folly of the weak and fatuous. ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... easily and quickly, we demand no more of him; we are satisfied, we are delighted, and any mistakes of grammar or pronunciation do but increase the charm, investing with more than its intrinsic quality any good thing said—making us marvel at it and exchange fatuous glances over it, as we do when a little child says something sensible. But heaven protect us from the foreigner who pauses, searches, fumbles, revises, comes to standstills, has recourse to dumb-show! Away with him, by the first train to Dover! And ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... possibilities of a ladylike personality that might mean much financial profit in the devious ways of which she was a mistress. With the frankness characteristic of her, she proceeded to paint glowing pictures of a future shared to the undoing of ardent and fatuous swains. Mary Turner listened with curiosity, but she was in no wise moved to follow such a life, even though it did not necessitate anything worse than a fraudulent playing at love, without physical degradation. So, she steadfastly continued her refusals, to the great astonishment of Aggie, who actually ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... demonstration against that great doctrine. Even before his nomination was anticipated he was the most important factor in the revolt against the Administration, and any division (of a division) which sacrificed or endangered the chief pillar of strength seemed peculiarly fatuous and perilous. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... an event, and the opinions concerning it, of such people might have been pretty accurately predicted; nor would it be fair to laugh at their terror and bewilderment, their confusion of tongues and the fatuous theories they adventured by way of explanation. For wiser than they—men experienced in the problems of humanity and trained to solve its enigmas—were ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... faintest sigh. The habitual look of abstraction returned to her eyes as if she had once more taken refuge in her own ideal world. Unfortunately the change did not escape either the sensitive observation or the fatuous misconception of the sagacious parent. "Ye'll be mountin' a few furbelows and fixins, Rosey, I reckon, ez only natural. Mabbee ye'll have to prink up a little now that we've got a gentleman contractor ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... a Duke that he was! Blind, crass and most fatuous of wooers! Had he been bred in courts and his ears attuned to words that meant nothing, that were but the empty echoes of what should have been meant; was he so new to courtesies in which the heart ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... within the bright twilight, Amedee spread the crisp white cloth and served me at a table on my pavilion porch. He feigned anxiety lest I should find certain dishes (those which he knew were most delectable) not to my taste, but was obviously so distended with fatuous pride over the whole meal that it became a temptation to denounce at least some trifling sauce or garnishment; nevertheless, so much mendacity proved beyond me and I spared him and my own conscience. This puffed-uppedness of his was to be observed only in his expression ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... atmosphere of Brodonowski's: he no longer brought the sunshine of his expansive, elaborate presence into the limits of the dingy little place; nor did its clever, shabby constituents, with their bright-eyed contempt for the popular slaves of a fatuous public, care to swell the successful throng who worshipped the rising genius in his new temple in Grove Road. The fact that in those days Rainham avoided Lightmark's name, once so often quoted; his demeanour, when the more ignorant or less tactical ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... verging perilously upon the infatuated, if not fatuous, he repeated her name aloud; and she looked at him out of soft grey eyes that seemed ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... of the day he began to wonder if he had not been a fatuous idiot. Anna did her work with the thoroughness of her German blood plus her American training. She came back minus her hat, and with her eyes carefully powdered, and not once during the morning was he able to ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... unsightly firework of unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head, and the shame instead of the honor;—and finally concentrate and rest the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on the dissection of a carcass,—perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may be for us, and for ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... house, there was nothing in his subsequent conduct on which he could plume himself. He could not congratulate himself on his wisdom; sheer luck had carried him through as far as the rue Soleil d'Or—mere chance, and that capricious fortune which sometimes convoys the stupid, fatuous, and astigmatic. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... large eyes was very peculiar. I can liken it to nothing but the sheen of intense moonlight on burnished metal. But that cannot express it. It glared white and suddenly—almost fatuous. I thought of Moore's lines whenever I looked ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... parasite, whom he had set down as a worshiper of sham heroes, undoubtedly did not look like an associate of Bodine's, and had a certain seriousness that demanded respect. As he looked closer into his wide, round face, seamed with small-pox, he fancied he saw even in its fatuous imbecility something of that haunting devotion he had seen on the refined features of the wife. He said ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... prepared for the edification of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his tales—in ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... cathartics, purgatives, and in consequence we start in life with teeth, intestines, appendices, out of gear and nervous systems on edge. With unconscious stupidity we continue the fatuous practice. The monarch selected to preside over the functions of human life was the Liver; and it is only with bated breath that any doctor dares question the legitimacy of that monarch's claim. The loyal subjects of King Liver ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... cynical," Martin exhorted. "The magazine editors are not wholly fatuous. I know that. And I'll close with you on the bet. I'll wager anything you want that 'Ephemera' is accepted either on the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... that they were the model couple. He was as devoted as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm goodheartedness! And she—so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair! Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Christ and further removed from this contention. They cannot stand that, they protest that they are being betrayed, they appeal to the word of God pure and simple, they turn away from the comments of men. Treacherous and fatuous excuse. We urge the word of God, they darken the meaning of it. We appeal to the witness of the Saints as interpreters, they withstand them. In short their position is that there shall be no trial, unless you stand by the judgment ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... from one to the other. On each face she read a fatuous eagerness. She knew the futility of pleading with Frederik. She knew still more surely the uselessness of trying to make Peter Grimm change his stubborn wishes. With a little catch in her breath, she gave up the hopeless, ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... hastily and went to Madame Ragon's bedchamber. Cesar during the dinner had make various fatuous remarks, which caused the judge and Pillerault to smile, and reminded the unhappy woman of how unfitted her poor husband was to grapple with misfortune. Her heart was full of tears; and she instinctively dreaded du Tillet, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... course, a mere student," said I, with a fatuous smile, "hardly more, I might say, than an earnest inquirer. At the same time, it seemed to me that you were a little severe upon Weissmann in this matter. Has not the general evidence since that date tended to—well, to strengthen ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... interested, appreciative, intelligent to a remarkable degree—Good Heavens! I'm doing it! I blush now when I remember that I engaged Miss Farr's services in the first place from motives of philanthropy. Is it possible that I was ever fatuous enough to believe that I was the party who conferred the benefit? If so, I very soon discovered my mistake. In justice to myself I must state that I saw at once what a treasure I had come upon. You remember what a quick, sure judgment my father had? ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... cost of the war must be laid according to the capacity to bear it. It would be fatuous folly and crass selfishness to wish it laid or endeavor to have it laid otherwise. All I am advocating in effect is that in the public interest not too much be exacted at once, but that by dividing the burden over a reasonable number of years, capital in no one year and especially ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... burnt a fellow's fingers, and he at once dropped it upon his brethren underground; they were badly scorched, and none of the gang has been seen since. I mention this accident as proving how difficult it is to manage the black miner. The strictest regulations are issued to prevent the fatuous nigger killing himself, but all in vain: he is worse, if possible, than his white confrere. If I had the direction all the powder-work should be done by responsible Europeans. I would fire by electricity, the battery remaining ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... of two men who were reeling toward him under the influence of this drug-like intoxication, and he was startled by a likeness which one of them bore to some one he had seen; but where, and under what circumstances, he could not determine. The fatuous eye, the features of complacent vanity and self-satisfied reverie were there, either intensified by drink, or perhaps suggesting it through some other equally hopeless form of hallucination. He turned and followed the man, trying to identify ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... We all possess what is known as magnetism. Some have it in an unusual degree, as did Edwin Booth, Franz Liszt, Phillips Brooks and Bismarck. It was surely neither the art nor the ability of Daniel Webster that made his audiences accept some of his fatuous platitudes as great utterances, nor was it the histrionic talent alone of Richard Mansfield that enabled him to wring success from such an obvious theatrical contraption as Prince Karl. Both Webster, with his fathomless eyes and his ponderous voice, and Mansfield, with ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... motherly Swedish woman, who has four children and ten tin cups and a great bed and five trunks and a fatuous, feckless husband makes time, between cousins and uncles and custom-house men and sharpers, to run up every now and then to say that Nora must not cry, that she must be easy, that she has spoken to the master and the master has said they are three hours earlier than they were expected. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... hospitable For all, unchallenged, is my style; But trust not to the fatuous fable That Caliban's free of my isle With prosperous Prospero's free consent. Such lies ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... most welcome: in which, however, it does not differ widely from most of your letters. I read somewhere in some fatuous Complete Letter-writer or something, that it is correct to imitate the order of subjects, etc. observed by your correspondent. In obedience to this rule of breeding I will hurriedly remark that my holiday has been nice enough in itself; we walk about; lie on the sand; go and swim in the sea ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... dropped the book. There seemed something rather fatuous about this story, for though it had a thrilling plot, and was full of well-connected people, it had apparently been contrived to throw no light on anything whatever. He looked at the author's name; everyone was highly ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... afraid of doing anything which might provoke a fresh "split." Later he delivered himself of the unstatesmanlike and unworthy apophthegm: "Better be united in support of a short-sighted and foolish policy than divided in support of a far-sighted and wise one." This was the fatuous attitude which led him down the steep declivity that ended so tragically for him and his reputation. In those fateful days, when so much was in the balance for the future of Ireland, Mr O'Brien pressed his views earnestly upon Mr Redmond ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... utterly fatuous piece of speech. Merthyr allowed it to slip, and studied him to see ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... justified by ineffable recollections, our friend was more provoked than he could say, though he was also considerably amused, for he had a good while since, made up his mind about the element of rather stupid convention in it. It was fatuous to miss so little the fine perceptions one didn't have: so far from its showing experience it showed a sad simplicity not to FEEL Francie Dosson. He thanked God she was just the sort of imponderable infinite quantity, such as there ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... would not produce Savina with the triumphant indication that her resistless charm explained everything. He was no such fatuous fool! But, studying her, he got a solid assurance from the superiority of her person. Daniel would see at once that this wasn't the usual flight south of an indulgence headed for paresis. Savina, his entire affair, demanded a dignified reception. They were seated in the patio of the hotel, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Iglesias deeply, begetting in him an almost hopeless sense of isolation. The vapid talk at dinner, poor little Mrs. Porcher's misplaced advances—the fact of which it appeared to him equally idle to deny and fatuous to admit—the dreary scene with his unhappy fellow-lodger, the good deed done which just now appeared fruitless—all these contributed to make the complaint of the exiled cedar's tormented branches an echo of the complaint of his ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... its magnificent staging, as the excuse for the lovely music of "La Gioconda." The Metropolitan Opera House never offered anything so sumptuous. It appealed irresistibly to the artistic instinct. It exploded the fatuous policy that causes the appearance in this city of those senseless, antiquated spectacles—food for neither adult nor juvenile—known as "Drury Lane pantomime," a form of entertainment that in its native land has ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... year after I have published my last book, I shall be practically forgotten; ten years later, I shall be as absolutely forgotten as one of those novelists of the early part of this century, whose names one doesn't even recognise. What fatuous posing!' ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... row behind him asked, "Well, Bethell, how will their judgment go?" Bethell replied, in his softest but most cutting tones, "I do not know. Knight-Bruce is a jack-pudding. Turner is an old woman. And no human being can by any possibility predict what will fall from the lips of that inexpressibly fatuous individual who sits in the middle." This is funny, but it is vulgar, and it is not given in good faith. It is the offspring of anger and spite mixed with a desire ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... had allowed for the falsehoods I should have to tell; but I found that in fact when it came to the point I had not. Besides, now that I had an opening there was a kind of relief in being frank. Lastly (it was perhaps fanciful, even fatuous), I guessed that Miss Tita personally would not in the last resort be less my friend. So after a moment's hesitation I answered, "Yes, I have written about him and I am looking for more material. In heaven's name have ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... at untimely hours made for a too-rounded outline, but to my surprise the mother took this as a tribute to the creature's grace, crying, "Yes, he wuzzum wuzzums a fatty ole sing," with an air of most fatuous pride, and followed this by announcing my name to it with ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... all the silly, stupid, fatuous, fungus-grown, doddering, drivelling dolts anywhere, past or future, I alone am far and away ahead of the whole lot of 'em in silliness and absurd behaviour! Damnation! I'm ashamed! The idea of my being ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... said Vane bending over and patting her neck; "but I s'pose it's only in keeping with everything else these days—it's not fairness that counts; it's just luck—fatuous idiotic luck. It's not even a game; it's a wild-cat gamble all over the world. And may Heaven help us all when the bottom does drop out ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... speech, that Miss Sherwood's humility was not the calculated affectation of a coquette. Sometimes a man's unsuspicion is wiser, and Harkless knew that she was not flirting with him. In addition, he was not a fatuous man; he did not extend the implication of her words nearly so far as she would ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... for thought in this little speech when I remembered the fatuous talk at dinner-tables where I had sometimes met Browning, and thought of Tennyson's great talk and the lofty serenity of ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... really mean. The indifference between you and other young women is that which lay also between me and other young men: a special attractiveness... Thousands of slippers, did I say? Tens of thousands. I had hoarded them with a fatuous pride. On the evening of my betrothal I made a bonfire of them, visible from three counties. I danced round it all night." And from his old eyes darted even now ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the lackadaisical lover in life and in fiction, and now he felt there was something absurdly pensive in this phenomenon of his own. He satisfied himself that he was not in love with Lucy, but here were the marked characteristics of the fond and fatuous hero—the obtruding face of the beloved, idealized and transfused with a sickly pathos; the premonitory tremblings; the recurrence of thoughts of the fair. It was all in defiance of his philosophy—an insult to his manhood. Like many ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... [Footnote: Baillie, II. 391-396, and Appendix to same vol., 509, 510; Burnet's Hamiltons, 378; and Hallam, II. 187-8, and Notes.] To the Queen at Paris her husband's continued hesitation on the Episcopacy question seemed positively fatuous. Her letters, as well as Jermyn's and Colepepper's, had not ceased to urge bold concession on that question, and a paction with the Scots for Presbytery. Now, accordingly, their counsels to this effect became ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... foolish," he replied with an amused smile; "do just what you want, of course." To Nancy, the smile spoke a great deal more. "How fatuous you are," it said, "with your devotion to my son and to me. Let a lollypop in the way of a trip to California come along, and away you go as if you didn't have a responsibility in the world. There's a firm nature ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... surprise that his friend Davie was capable of such trust; but the Baron gave him to understand that this poor simpleton was neither fatuous, NEC NATURALITER IDIOTA, as is expressed in the brieves of furiosity, but simply a crack-brained knave, who could execute very well any commission which jumped with his own humour, and made his folly a plea for avoiding every other. 'He has made an ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... to his capacity. It suffices that, in being stuffed with the preposterous delusion about Olivia, Sir Andrew is rendered supremely happy at the time; while he manifestly has not force enough to remember it with any twinges of shame or self-reproach. And we feel that, while clawing his fatuous crotchets and playing out his absurdities, Sir Toby is really doing Sir Andrew no wrong, since the latter is then most himself, is in his happiest mood, and in the most natural freedom of his indigenous gifts and graces. All which quite precludes any division of our sympathies, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... to permit the enactment of adequate laws. The belief that a malcontent armed with freedom of speech, a newspaper, a vote and a rifle is less dangerous than a malcontent with a still tongue in his head, empty hands and under police surveillance was abandoned, but all too late. From its fatuous dream the nation was awakened by the noise of arms, the shrieks of women and the red ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... Law is an usher to lead the way to grace. God is the God of the humble, the miserable, the afflicted. It is His nature to exalt the humble, to comfort the sorrowing, to heal the broken-hearted, to justify the sinners, and to save the condemned. The fatuous idea that a person can be holy by himself denies God the pleasure of saving sinners. God must therefore first take the sledge-hammer of the Law in His fists and smash the beast of self-righteousness and its brood of self-confidence, self-wisdom, self-righteousness, and self-help. When ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... last and strongest argument in favor of the general exclusion of Chinese laborers from this country, however, is the racial argument. The Chinese are just as different in race from us as the negro, and if racial heredity counts for anything it is fatuous to hope to assimilate them to the social type of the whites. Moreover, if we should open our doors to the mass of Chinese laborers China would be able to swamp us with Chinese immigrants. With its hundreds of millions of population China could spare to us several hundred thousand ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... at him marveling. "I'm so fatuous about you!" she exclaimed; "the least little thing you say, I see the most wonderful possibilities in it. I know you'd say what you meant, no matter how many thousands had said it before. And since I know it's not stupidness in you, why, it seems to me just splendidly and ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... significance of her bearing, of her dress, of her speech, of her present mode of life, of its comparative luxury, its social distinction of a kind which lifted her above even the Gorgios by whom she was surrounded. A fatuous belief in himself and in his personal powers had deluded him. He had told the truth when he said that no woman had ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other women from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had dreamed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Pamela, then, were certainly justified: and even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this first complete English novel from ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... face was a challenge; the man who had the pride, without the malignity, of Lucifer; this very man crawls into a Birmingham house, uninvited and unexpected, and announces himself as the "humble friend" of some pudding-headed people, engaged in a fatuous occupation that makes one blush ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... a more weightily reasoned argument the Pope confronts the long perplexity and entanglement of circumstances with the fatuous optimism which insists that somehow justice and virtue do rule in the world. Consider all the doings at Arezzo, before and after the consummation of the tragedy. What of the Aretine archbishop, to whom Pompilia cried ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... had been bored and provoked by the incessant blunders of the Liberal ministry in its last years, and, like Matthew Arnold, had welcomed a change of government, soon began to see that they had exchanged what was merely fatuous and foolish for what was actively mischievous. They were forced to ask themselves how much of the political faith which they had professed was "real stuff," and how much was "claptrap." Disraeli soon taught them that, even ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the irony of events, Slade was afterward arrested and imprisoned for fraud, in England. This fact so prejudiced the public mind against Zoellner that his name became a word of scorn, and the fourth dimension a synonym for what is fatuous and false. Zoellner died of it, but since his death public opinion has undergone a change. There is a great and growing interest in everything pertaining to the fourth dimension, and belief in that order of phenomena upon which Zoellner based his deductions is supported by ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... and declared him better than both, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings and play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves with the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all possible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressed into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox that pain is not an ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... despairing appeal upon Mary who thereupon announced her intention of going to to-night's performance in the park. She would drive, of course, and would be glad to take Mr. Ware along. Or, for that matter, she would set him down first wherever he might want to go. He smiled upon her with the fatuous smile of one who finds he has made an unexpected conquest and said he would be delighted to ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... matter, or one at least with which the immediate connection was not at first apparent. "Were you amused at me just now—when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for? Did you think me," she asked with some earnestness—"well, fatuous?" ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... have given expression to their thoughts seem to think that the only solution of the Negro question is his migration to Africa, but to me such a proposition is utterly fatuous. The Negro is essential to the South in order that it may have proper labor. An attempt of Negroes to migrate from one state to another not many years ago led to open violence at white instigation to prevent it. More than this, the Negroes have now reached 9,000,000 in number. Their ...
— The South and the National Government • William Howard Taft
... surface; this, however, will appear more clearly in the following chapter. It will also appear how far-reaching were the consequences of the denial of design that was involved in Mr. Darwin's theory that luck is the main element in survival, and how largely this theory is responsible for the fatuous developments in connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which a few years ago seemed about to carry everything ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the leg and regarded it. Heavens! how for these three years past he had hated it! He looked up. From the far side of the room the bust watched him, still with its fatuous smile. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... compensation works with no such pleasing simplicity, and he rolled to the dark bottom of his folly. There he felt everything go—his wits, his courage, his probity, everything that had made him what his fatuous marriage had so promptly unmade. He walked up the Rue Vivienne with his hands in his empty pockets and stood half an hour staring confusedly up and down the brave boulevard. People brushed against him and half a dozen carriages almost ran over him, until at last ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... combination-rooms, and dissipate the dulness of Camford life. Suffice it to say that Hazlet displayed an ignorance at once egregious and astounding; the ingenious perversity of his mistakes, the fatuous absurdity of his confusions, would be inconceivable to any who do not know by experience the extraordinary combinations of ignorance and conceit. The examiners were very lenient and forbearing, but Hazlet was plucked; ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... devote To misery through ill-assorted unions, Or habits reckless of maternal dues; How marriage, sacredest of mortal steps, Is entered on from motives all unworthy; Social ambition, mercenary aims, The dread of poverty, of singleness,— The object of uniting families,— And momentary passion fatuous. So I resolved, God helping, to be true To my own self, and that way true ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... to be a composer" or "I don't want to be a virtuoso—I only want to play just a little for my own amusement." The teacher knows and appreciates the pupil's attitude exactly, and while he realizes that his reasoning is altogether fatuous, it seems well-nigh impossible to explain to the amateur that unless he does his work right he will get very little real pleasure ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... wished that he had never spoken. It is true that the steward's false pride had roused his indignation, and who can listen calmly to any comment on a stain on his birth? But the appeal of this miserable father's daughter had gone to his heart. He pitied the fatuous simpleton whom, with a turn of his hand, he could reduce to beggary, and who had evidently been far more deeply hurt by his words than Pontius had been by what he had overheard, and so he followed the kindly impulse of a noble nature to spare ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was a kind of too terrible bushranger without the romance! He was gauche, he knew, and he hated the tea-parties. They talked about things of which he knew nothing; he was too sincere to cover his convictions with the fatuous chatter that passed, in Fallacy Street society, for brilliant wit. That it was fatuous he was convinced, but his conviction made matters ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy—that is to say, the formation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was something fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy cast the first stone ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... fell for it. And for all that morning he looked just the way I wanted him to look. But the next morning, having had the spending of certain moneys, he looked too tidy and well fed for Satan. And this morning he was hopeless. He looked smug and fatuous and disgustingly self-satisfied. So I gave him quite a lot of money, not wishing to hurt the creature's feelings, and told him to go away." She looked up, laughing at herself. "Do you know, I really believed I'd dreamed out a golden inspiration, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... Barbara. He stood with his pudgy hands in his pockets, gazing at the averted face, unconcealed and growing amusement in the scrutiny, until Caleb, not yet aware of the boy's woods-taught habit of seeing while seeming not to see, was simultaneously annoyed at Allison's fatuous grin, and glad of the fact that Steve apparently was looking the other way. After a time Allison raised quizzical ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... I married," he announced, and, not to appear too serious, he smiled into her glowing face. She looked happy enough to encourage a man far less fatuous ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... impartial, offered the curates flowers. They accepted them with native awkwardness. Malone seemed specially at a loss, when a bouquet filled one hand, while his shillelah occupied the other. Donne's "Thank you!" was rich to hear. It was the most fatuous and arrogant of sounds, implying that he considered this offering a homage to his merits, and an attempt on the part of the heiress to ingratiate herself into his priceless affections. Sweeting alone received the posy like a smart, sensible little man, as he was, putting ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... fatuous smile about his lips; there was only silence now, a silence that had a pulse in it—the beating of his heart. Seconds only ... suddenly there was another pulse, from another heart. ECAIAC wasn't quite finished! Unerring and resolute the ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... have over-praised this Community Club House; with the whole country to draw from for examples it may well appear fatuous to concentrate the reader's attention, for so long, on a building in a remote part of the Middle West: cheap, temporary, and requiring only twenty-one days for its erection. But of the transvaluation of values brought about by the war, this building is an eminent example: ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... is there with all its boundless store that their 'work' would turn into wealth if they could but get at it. They are kept idle because those who own the country cannot find them employment at a profit to themselves, because the blind, fatuous insanity of your 'system of trade' makes no provision even for ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... reeling with the shock of the constantly recurring fevers—though I knew how the malaria, rising out of that very fairness, was slowly undermining my constitution, and insidiously sapping the powers of mind and body—I regarded the alluring face of the land with a fatuous love, and felt a certain sadness steal over me as each day I was withdrawing myself from it, and felt disposed to quarrel with the fate that seemed to eject me out ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... insipid smile he had! How fatuous, and then again how profound, his conversation could be! He took upon himself the impudent liberty of running in and out at Eberhard's whenever he felt like it. He bored him with his discussion of philosophic systems, or with miserable gossip about his neighbours. He watched ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... quivering, heated air. Even so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate — are the tell-tale inwoven initials still decipherable? — I used to watch Her pacing demurely towards me through the corn. It was ridiculous, it was fatuous, under all the circumstances it was monstrous, and yet{...}! We were both under twenty, so She was She, and I was I, and there were only we three the wide world over, she and I and the unbetraying gate. Porta eburnea! ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... for not having, long ago, in all these years, found out that you were the woman that any man with eyes to see, any man not blinded and fatuous, ought to have been in love with from ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... more inclined to amalgamate with the rest of the community. We saw, also, several "Dutch Charleys" who had struck it rich. They were moon-faced, bland, chuckle-headed looking men, generally with walrus moustaches, squat and heavy, with fatuous, placid smiles. I suppose they had no real idea of values, but knew only the difference between having money and not having money. These prosperous individuals carried two or even more watches at the ends of long home-made chains constructed of gold nuggets fastened together with lengths of copper ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... agony of solemnity. At the same time I was amused. I didn't take a gloomy view of that "vanishing girl" trick. Somehow I couldn't. But I said nothing. None of us said anything. We sat about that big round table as if assembled for a conference and looked at each other in a sort of fatuous consternation. I would have ended by laughing outright if I had not been saved from that impropriety by poor ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... something of that complaint. She's been living on sausages, I suppose. Torp, you should have handed her over to a policeman for presuming to faint in a respectable house. Poor little wretch! Look at the face! There isn't an ounce of immorality in it. Only folly,—slack, fatuous, feeble, futile folly. It's a typical head. D'you notice how the skull begins to show through the flesh padding on the face ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... behaviour—than which nothing, ever, was more selfish—to the possibility of stray crumbs for the four small creatures. The tale of Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had lost little of its point; the incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr. Condrip, the parson of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on record to keep criticism consistent. He had presented his profile on system, having, goodness ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... ironist twisted his mouth. "It will be many a day ere sleep makes contest with my eyes . . . unless it be cold and sinister sleep. Sleep? You are laughing! Only the fatuous and the self-satisfied sleep . . . and the dead. So be it." He took the tongs and stirred the log, from which flames suddenly darted. "I wonder what they are doing at Voisin's to-night?" irrelevantly. "There ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... not cast for any important part in young Reid's future drama, Mackenzie understood. As if his thoughts had penetrated to the young man's heart, making fatuous any further attempt at concealment of his ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... this, but, like many, many other managers, Schofield and Williams restrained their choler, and even laughed fulsomely when their principal attraction essayed the role of a comedian in private, and capered and squawked in sheer, fatuous vanity. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... reputation of being the oldest Sunday School teacher in the Five Towns. He was indeed exceedingly old, foolish, and undignified in senility; and the louts were odiously jeering at his defenceless dotage, and a young policeman was obviously with the louts and against the aged, fatuous victim. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... absorbed by the idea that the Marquis was accompanying Annette and continuing his attempts to please her by his fatuous and affected gallantry. ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... "Michin" in one letter), not yet famous for golf though perhaps already for lavender. Later he visited her at Montgomery Castle, the famous seat of the Herberts. She is said to have been very beautiful, and the subtle touch of not in the least fatuous or ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... into her glance as she spoke, which belied her words, and which penetrated even the sodden intellect of poor Blunt. He balanced himself on his heels for a moment, and holding by the moulding of the cabin, stared at her with a fatuous smile of drunken admiration, then looked at the glass in his hand, hiccuped with much solemnity thrice, and, as though struck with a sudden sense of duty unfulfilled, swallowed the contents at a gulp. The effect was almost ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... to remark that the Professor's Wanderings, so far as his stoical and cynical envelopment admits us to clear insight, here first take their permanent character, fatuous or not. That Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four seems to have withered up what little remnant of a purpose may have still lurked in him: Life has become wholly a dark labyrinth; wherein, through long years, our Friend, flying from spectres, has to stumble about at random, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... this unacknowledged, almost unknown woman. She was the only human being that had power to shatter his egotism and resolve him into the common elements of a base manhood. Of little avail his eloquence now! He had cajoled a sovereign dukedom out of an aged and fatuous prince; he had cajoled a wife, who yet was no wife, from among the highest of a royal court; he had cajoled success from Fate by a valour informed with vanity and ambition; years ago, with eloquent arts he had cajoled a young girl into a secret marriage—but he could no longer cajole the woman ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... irrational, silly, imbecile, witless, insensate, weak-minded, half-witted, brainless, fatuous, fatuitous, insagacious, unintelligent; indiscreet, imprudent, ridiculous, absurd, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... brave, and circumstances had not been kind to her. At this moment, was she not contending with herself? Was not her honesty, her dignity, struggling against the impulses of her heart? Rhoda's love had been worth more than his, and it would be her one love in life. A fatuous reflection, perhaps; yet every moment's observation ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... view the sight of the august senators of a great Power rushing to New York and beginning to bully and badger the luckless "Yamsi"—on the very quay-side so to speak—seems to furnish the Shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these ships! ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... poetry of the Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have to look at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous smile; but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in front. Then a swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me, and he subsided into the corner. The intoxication was gaining on ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... utter impossibility. As a result, after three days of active campaign the infantryman is seen gayly stalking along with no burden save his rifle, ammunition-belt, and a wisp of gray blanket, which seems to me to be a fatuous and footless condition of affairs that might well be quickly remedied for the benefit of ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... that fact," went on the other severely, "a real stumbling-block was removed. You see, Elkin, you have behaved throughout like a perfect fool, and thus lent a sort of credibility to an otherwise absurd notion. Your furious hatred of Mr. Grant, for instance, born of an equally fatuous—or, shall I say? fat-headed—belief that Miss Martin would marry you for the mere asking, led you into deep waters. It was a mistake, too, when you lied to P.C. Robinson as to the time you came home on that ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... with one of his fatuous grins. "I never see any feller who needed disinfectin' more." Then he turned upon the evil-faced choreman and added his morsel of admonition. "Say, old man, as you hope to git buried yourself when James gits around ag'in, I guess you best go an' dig ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... universal audience he offers nothing more and nothing less than what is universal to mankind. Of the common range of thought and feeling he is perfect and absolute master; and in the graver passages of the epistles, as in the sad and noble cadence of his most fatuous odes, the melancholy temper which underlay his quick and bright humor touches the deepest springs of human nature. Of his style the most perfect criticism was given in the next generation by a single phrase, Horatii curiosa ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... kept up a constant stream of idle boastings on the road to the Mission House, about being "waal-thy" and "Faather shure bein' a gen'leman when they were waal-thy" and "herself as foine as eny loidy in th' land," and more and more of the same, all the way down the Ridge Trail; which was not so fatuous as it sounded, when it voiced the convictions of a great many more people than the little unwashed garlicky Shanty Town dancer. Eleanor wondered if the same arguments applied to the culture of horses and pigs and potatoes—size instead of sort, fulness of ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... gallantry's very grateful servant," she whispered, having much ado to keep from laughing in his face. The fatuous are easily pacified. ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... his large and rather sickly eyes upon her. For a moment he was in doubt, but belief in the witchery of sound prevailed, for he had yet to meet a being insensible to the "music of the soul," and so with a fond and fatuous murmur he pinched the martyred atmosphere once ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... not fatuous, though he's so good-looking. He's not a lady-killing sort of person or anything ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... people, so that they could show others, and those others show all the world. How confidently that yellow-hammer repeats his song! How well he knows that his song is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the linnet envies him! The fools that talk of nature's cruelty, the blind fatuous sentimental coxcombs!" ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... ablaze With fatuous fires, Enkindled by his wiles To new embraces, Did I, by wilful ways And baseless ires, Return the anxious smiles Of ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... It is of no use to complain that he never was cut out to be a leader in anything but ethical ideas of statesmanship. It was political makeshiftery to make such a man the leader of Ontario Liberalism, which did not ask to be led but to be cajoled and tricked up for the carnival. It was fatuous to imagine that he could ever become a chief of the National Liberal and Conservative party to which he now inextricably belongs. If secret ambition ever spurred him to indulge that dream—which seems incredible—sober reflection at the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... look fine in those clothes, I tell you—fine," said Septimus Rainer, and his air was almost fatuous. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... and better than its elder! but, though the careless assumption that it is so is somewhat general, history alone shows how false and impudent the assumption often is. Too often genius itself must submit to the silly presumption of its noisy and fatuous children, and it is the young fool who too often knocks imperiously at the door of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion. Every man makes his contribution negative under the erroneous impression that the next man's contribution is positive. Every man surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender. And over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this new and wearisome and platitudinous press, incapable of invention, incapable of audacity, capable only of a servility all the more contemptible because it is not even a servility to the strong. But all who begin with force and ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... tightest. Darius was biting his lower lip with his upper teeth. His humour had swiftly changed to the savage. Every warning that had been uttered for years past concerning that floor was remembered with startling distinctness. Every impatient reassurance offered by Darius for years past suddenly seemed fatuous and perverse. How could any man in his senses expect the old floor to withstand such a terrific strain as that to which Darius had at last dared to subject it? The floor ought by rights to have given way years ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... alarmed and restless at the growth and tendencies of the Republican party—that this element nominated as a third ticket an out-and-out pro-slavery candidate; and (fourth) a "Constitutional Union" ticket, representing a well-meant but fatuous desire to keep slavery out of national ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Good; and there they stand vacillating all the time, or at the most content themselves now and then with a terrified rush for the Beautiful and the Whole. They are fascinated by all three and faithful to none. Frida Tancred scorned their fatuous procedure. Balked of the best, she would never console herself with half-measures and the second best; as for all lesser values, there was something in her which would always mark her from Mrs. Fazakerly and her kind. With Frida it was either the whole or nothing; ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... any other part of Europe was there any scenery to compare with that of the United States. But perhaps the unkindest cut of all was that of the reporter at Washington who made me introduce my remarks by the fatuous expression "Methought"! Mr. E.A. Freeman was much amused by a reporter who said of him: "When he don't know a thing, he says he don't. When he does, he speaks as if he were certain of it." Mr. Freeman adds: "To ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... unimportant we are in the vast scheme of things. We envisage the infinite reaches of astronomical space overhead. Realms of largeness unfathomable. And at our feet, everywhere, a myriad entrances into the infinitely small. With ourselves in between—with our fatuous human consciousness that we are of some importance to ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... the calculation of His mighty ways, from the evidence before the material senses, is fatuous. It is like commencing with the minus sign, to learn ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... clearly than any other man of his time saw the end from the beginning of the fatuous and featherheaded French Revolution of 1789, I have always been inclined to think "the application of theory to methods of government a surprising imbecility in the human mind:" and it will be found that in this book I have done little more than set down, as fully and ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... just as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilled and educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the England of to-day, in—or a little way out of—orders, with his smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable snobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of this coming class. Moreover, the new element will necessarily embody its collective, necessarily distinctive, and unprecedented thoughts ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... rather a fatuous remark, and from you of all people in the world. My most agreeable reminiscences are, without exception, connected with occasions on which I had escaped from my body-guard of nymphs. At the present moment you would do well to face the fact, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... nature, we know it to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love is great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the familiar. It is destructive because it not only closes but contradicts life. Unlikely people die. The one certain thing, it is also the one improbable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... her that he had said nothing because he knew it was the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... there. Socrates tells me that their amusements are of a most innocent 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 ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... not deserve it," he conceded, to a dilapidated faun, who, though his flute and the hands that held it had been missing for over a quarter of a century, piped, on with unimpaired and fatuous mirth. "Ah, heart of gold—demented trinket that you are, I have not merited that you should retain my likeness all these years! If I had my deserts—parbleu! let us accept such benefits as the gods provide, and not question the wisdom ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... treason to that same business, whatever it might be. And of what it might be Sir Rowland had grounds upon which to found at least a guess. Had perhaps Wilding acted upon some similar feelings in avoiding the duel? He wondered; and when Richard dismissed Diana's challenge with a fatuous laugh, it was Blake who took ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... height, and, though past middle age, bore himself with singular grace and vigour. He had still a rarely handsome face—too handsome, by far, for Harry's taste. The features were of an impossible, absurd perfection. There was something superhuman or fatuous, at least something vastly irritating, in his assured calm, his ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... its own destruction. But that is not the whole of the story. Any man in America or anywhere else that supposes that the free industry and enterprise of the world can continue if the Pan-German plan is achieved and German power fastened upon the world is as fatuous as the dreamers in Russia. What I am opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them. I want peace, but I know how to get it, ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... the fatuous Inspector Letstrayed in the ribs. That worthy, who had been thoughtfully regarding the ceiling for some ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... the martial music of the long-lost hosts of the Lord, or before whose eyes there swayed the entrancing forms of the dancing-girls of Babylon, stares horrified from chairman to audience. He sees crabbed old men and barren old women before him, afflicted youths and fatuous maidens; and he realises at once that the golden keys which he possesses to the gates of the treasury of the jewelled Past will not open the doors of that charnel-house which they desire to be shown. The scent of the king's roses fades from his nostrils, the Egyptian music which ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... takers. The fact shattered his confidence. Here were two hundred book-makers, trained to their calling, anxious at absurd odds to back their opinion that the horse he liked could not win. In the face of such unanimous contempt, his dream became fantastic, fatuous. He decided he would risk only half of his fortune. Then, should the horse win, he still would be passing rich, and should he lose, he would, at least, have all ...
— The Man Who Could Not Lose • Richard Harding Davis
... branch of surgery. He demolished the legend of his having feared the operation would be fatal, giving an explanation which pleased our friend much better. He held that a gentleman should be painted but once in his life—that it was eager and fatuous to be hung up all over the place. That was good for women, who made a pretty wall-pattern; but the male face didn't lend itself to decorative repetition. The proper time for the likeness was at ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... Gifted with a certain amount of imagination, this idea of the interest, almost the beauty of the preposterous, took a firm hold of his mind. One day he, too, would be in Vanity Fair, displaying terrific boots, amazing thin legs, a fatuous or a frenetic countenance to the great world of the unknown. He would stand out from the multitude if only by virtue of an unusual eyeglass, a particular glove, the fashion of his tie or of his temper. He would balance on ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... France and Belgium was broken by Ludendorff's fatuous drive in March, 1918. After the allies had stopped it and inaugurated their counter-offensive all Europe made a startling discovery. The Germans were tenacious enough in trench warfare; in open fighting, known as war of maneouvre, they could not stand before American and the allied troops. Incessant ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... you," throws his hat at the back of his head, gulps down half his glass, and, while drawing breath for the other half, takes a hard, indifferent look at her, and in an off-hand voice throws her some fatuous, mirthless jest. ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... and close-set, revealing a tendency to suspiciousness—Bancroft prided himself on his prudence. A certain smartness of dress and a conscious carriage discovered a vanity which, in an older man, would have been fatuous. A large or a sensitive nature would in youth, at least, have sought unconsciously to bring itself into sympathy with strange surroundings, but Bancroft looked upon those who differed from him in manners or conduct as inferior, and this presumption ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... pavement. Were ever a statue given him (and indeed he is worthy of a grotesque in marble), it would be put in Pulteney Street or the Circus. I know that the palm trees of Antigua overshadowed his cradle, that there must be even now in Boulogne many who set eyes on him in the time of his less fatuous declension, that he died in London. But Mr. Coates (for of that Romeo I write) must be claimed by none of these places. Bath saw the laughable disaster of his debut, and so, in a manner, his whole life seems to belong ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... it was cruel to laugh, but laugh I did with a few others. Never has a man been so abused as was that luckless English Consul who penned such a fatuous message. The spy had already marched our troops half way and more; even the pessimistic allowed that they must have started; an authentic message showed clearly that it was folly and imagination. We would have to have weeks more of it, perhaps even a whole month. The people wept and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... It was this fatuous remark which showed Radley that I had no idea of my own relation to the coming conflict. So he forbore to spring upon me the greatest surprise of all. He just said with a sadness and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... three pints, handed one to me, another to his companion, and then taking the third drank to my health. I drank to his and that of his companion; the latter, after nodding to us both, emptied his at a draught, and then with a kind of half-fatuous leer, exclaimed, "Da ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... with an exterior more promising in many respects than that of his friend, could boast of no similar distinctions. He was the youngest son of a particularly fatuous peer resident in the neighbourhood, had started life as a barrister, in which profession he had attained a moderate success, had enjoyed a brief but not inglorious spell of soldiering, from which he had retired slightly lamed for life, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... together. Now who thou wast may it please thee that I know, and that from thy words I learn why for so many centuries thou hast lain here?" "At the time when the good Titus, with the aid of the Most High King, avenged the wounds wherefrom issued the blood sold by Judas, I was fatuous enough on earth with the name which lasts longest, and honors most,"[1] replied that spirit, "but not as yet with faith. So sweet was my vocal spirit, that me of Toulouse Rome drew to itself, where I deserved to adorn my temples with myrtle. Statius the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... noisy Americans, neatly dressed, and a good many prim, self-conscious ladies on the stage who had come on from their matinees and were accompanied mostly either by very young and rather chinless adorers, or by fat, fatuous men with dark moustaches, hair inclined to curl, and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... English poets fatuous for their imaginative interpretation of nature, high rank must be given to William Browne, who belongs in the list headed by Spenser, and including Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton, George Wither, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... justified. A fair case may also be made out for the use of idyllic scenes as a foil to the tragical, for the Shakespearian critics have no monopoly of the overworked plea, "justification by contrast." Nor could a French analogue of Dickens easily resist the temptation to give us a fatuous Passajon, an ebullient Pere Joyeuse—who seems to have been partly modelled on a real person—an exemplary "Bonne Maman," a struggling but eventually triumphant Andre Maranne. The home-lover Daudet also felt the necessity of showing ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
