FATUOUS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Fatuous

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/fˈætʃəwəs/ Listen

adjective

Fatuous adj.

Feeble in mind; weak; silly; stupid; foolish; fatuitous.

Without reality; illusory, like the ignis fatuus. "Thence fatuous fires and meteors take their birth."

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Etymology of 'Fatuous'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Fatuous" Quotes from Famous Books

... mind was typically French with something also Italianate about it, an inheritance perhaps from the long-dead Savoyard ancestor who brought the name to this continent. Later when Laurier had proved his quality and held firmly in his hands the reins of power, the fatuous Ontario Liberal explained him as that phenomenon, a man of pure French ancestry who was spiritually an Englishman—this conclusion being drawn from the fact that upon occasion the names of Charles James Fox ...

— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... Judge and Union Mills looked at each other in dazed astonishment, and then nervously set about their former habits, apparently in that fatuous belief common to such natures, that they were ignoring a painful situation. The Judge drew the barrel towards him, picked up the cards, and began mechanically to "make a patience," on which Union Mills gazed with ostentatious interest, but with eyes furtively conscious of the rigid figure ...

— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... usually superior to the man she has had to accept—that long after the death of the patient wife a bundle of letters was found, wherein it was clearly revealed that she who had always been silent was fully alive to the indifference and fatuous self-love of her vain and indolent husband. We may, it is true, be conscious of faults in others from which we are ourselves not exempt; although to discover a virtue, perhaps, we must needs have a germ of it in us. Such were Emily's parents. Around her, four sisters and one brother gravely ...

— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck

... there as submissive as if portraiture in oils had been a 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 the last, when the whole man was there—you got the totality of his experience. Lyon could ...

— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... of an imaginary kind which deal with the subject of romantic love are, almost without exception, fatuous and futile. The inanely amatory, with their languishing eyes, weary us. The endlessly osculatory, with their protracted salutations, are sickening. Even when an air of sentimental propriety is thrown about them by some such title ...

— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

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