"Fatuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... somewhat fatuous, self-conscious grin that no amount of intelligence can keep out of the face of a good-looking fellow who knows that he has made ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... eyes glanced quietly about and never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present. There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women eating fine pastry and talking passionately. It might have been a Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character. Even my youth and inexperience were aware of that. And I was by a long way the youngest person in the room. That quiet Monsieur Mills intimidated me a little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five), his massive tranquillity, his clear, watchful ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... said Fisher with a fatuous look at Mrs. Bagley. She mooned back at him. For a moment they were lost in one another, giving proof to the idea that blinder than he who will not see is the fellow who has his eye on ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... I have known very fine girls who caused the usual thrills, whose conservatory kisses I should never undervalue. But when it comes to the fatuous delirium—the celestial idiocy that queers the brain and impairs the vision—why, I ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... 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
... me to my reflections, which were mainly that Peter had the prettiest aunt in England, and that the world was very good. But my pleased and fatuous smile over these thoughts was disturbed by her ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... throw the great switch that will give you the freedom of the air of Okar, and then, in fatuous security, go on with thy red princess to the freedom of—death. When you have passed beyond this chamber in your flight, what can prevent Solan replacing the switch as it was before your vile hand touched it? Nothing; and then the Guardian of the North will claim ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... spoke of Ruby Ruggles, he had told himself that he and John Crumb were alike. With an honest, true, heartfelt desire they both panted for the companionship of a fellow-creature whom each had chosen. And each was to be thwarted by the make-believe regard of unworthy youth and fatuous good looks! Crumb, by dogged perseverance and indifference to many things, would probably be successful at last. But what chance was there of success for him? Ruby, as soon as want or hardship told upon her, would return ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... carried in her nurse's arms—for she was almost an infant at the time—to witness a witch-execution in the neighbourhood of Dornoch—the last which took place in Scotland. The lady well remembered the awe-struck yet excited crowd, the lighting of the fire, and the miserable appearance of the poor fatuous creature whom it was kindled to consume, and who seemed to be so little aware of her situation, that she held out her thin shrivelled hands to warm them at the blaze. But what most impressed the narrator—for it must have been a frightful incident ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... his loud, self-asserting voice; sometimes stopping suddenly, drawing his huge stature erect, and changing the keen and haughty expression of his face into the rapt and half fatuous look of the oracle, he would without preface recite some long fragment from Welsh or Scandinavian bards, his hands hanging from his chest and flapping in symphony. Then he would push on again, and ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... shoulder hung a goat-skin cloak embroidered with steel beads. A small package neatly done up in leaves probably contained his lunch. He teetered along with a mincing up and down step, every movement, and the expression of his face displaying a fatuous self-satisfaction. When we looked back again this youth had magically become two. Then appeared two women and a white goat. All except the goat were dressed for visiting, with long chains of beads, bracelets and anklets, and heavy ornaments ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... of his 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
... untrimmed. Valuable in themselves and full of information, while wholly misplaced in a recueil of folk-lore, where they stand like pegs behung with the contents of the translator's adversaria, the monographs on details of Arab life have also been exploited and reprinted under the "fatuous" title, "Arabian (for Egyptian) Society in the Middle Ages: Studies on The Thousand and One Nights." They were edited by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole (Chatto and Windus) ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... pleasant plays, that, in America at least, he owes his fame. Of the three unpleasant plays, The Philanderer has never been produced at all; Widower's Houses has been given only in a series of special matinees; and Mrs. Warren's Profession, though it was enormously advertised by the fatuous interference of the police, failed to interest the public when ultimately it was ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the living which are yet alive, 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... in any reference made to it by that lady herself. She had known great things and great people, but she had never played a great part. She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born to honours; she knew the world too well to nourish fatuous illusions on the article of her own place in it. She had encountered many of the fortunate few and was perfectly aware of those points at which their fortune differed from hers. But if by her informed ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... will make a formal declaration of war upon you before he commences hostilities, and that, so long as you are content to be deceived? {14} Impossible! For so long as you, though you are the injured party, make no complaint against him, but accuse some of your own body, he would be the most fatuous man on earth if he were to interrupt your strife and contentions with one another—to bid you turn upon himself, and so to cut away the ground from the arguments by which his hirelings put you off, when they tell you that he is not at ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... of meeting her "down-town," and in his fatuous innocence announced that she was "as pirty as ever." If he had hit Pheeny with a hatchet he would have inflicted a less ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... fatuous folk who, having become successful and lost their digestions, look back on their far youth, and talk, saying that their early days, despite miseries and hardships, were really, now they regard them dispassionately, the happiest of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs. Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... loom large and striking—picturesque, as the figure of one who by his character and will made and held his people; magnificent, as one who in the face of the blackest fortune never wavered from his aim or faltered in his effort; who, with a courage that seemed, and still seems, fatuous, but which may well be called heroic, stood up against the might of the greatest empire in the world. And, it may be, pathetic, too, as one whose limitations were great, one whose training and associations—whose very successes—had narrowed, and embittered and hardened him; as ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... this. In the first flush of conquest all men are a trifle fatuous, unobservant. No woman is. Miss Quiney's arms did not suddenly go out to Ruth. Ruth noted it. She was just: she understood. But (I repeat) she was a woman, and women remember indelibly whatever small thing happens at ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... traveller, well known both to Manchester and Leicester, repeated to him one day a remark of Purcell's, to the effect that since Daddy's migration Manchester had been well rid of a vagabond, and he, Purcell, of a family disgrace. Daddy, bursting with fatuous rage, and possessed besides of the wildest dreams of fortune on the strength of his 200 pounds, straightway made up his mind to return to Manchester, 'pull Purcell's nose,' and plant himself and his prosperity that was to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 in the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... transcend or pervert reason. So we may understand why it is true that sometimes those who but little understand why they are to die on the field of battle may display the greatest courage and the greatest enthusiasm for war, and we must not say that these causes are fatuous because they exist in the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... repetita" of those Little-go anecdotes, which at this period of the year awaken the laughter of 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; plucked too in Scripture History, which astonished everybody, until it became ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... a gulf between himself and his former life. What had passed between him and Faustina, might under other circumstances have become but a romantic episode in the past, to be thought of with a certain tender regret, half fatuous, half genuine, whenever the moonlight chanced to cast the right shadow and the artist's mind was in the contemplative mood. The peculiar smell of broken masonry, when it is a little damp, would recall the impression, perhaps; an old wall ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... photograph of Aggie, an angular, square-browed damsel, who looked as though she could guide the most recalcitrant of fishmongers into the paths of duty, was produced and thrust into Doggie's hand. He inspected it with polite appreciation, while his red-headed friend regarded him with fatuous anxiety. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... utmost diligence to his academic studies; so, in much less than half the time-allotment, he advances in his academic studies about half as fast as the day-school student. This schedule did not spring full-fledged from the seething brain of any theorist; it is no fatuous imitation of the educational practise of some remote and presumptively dissimilar institution; it has, so to say, elaborated itself in adjustment to the actual needs of the particular situation. This ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... 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
... idle and hungry because there is no 'work.' The earth 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
... stronger 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 wise and ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... deadlock in northern 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
... not allow herself to be frightened by the unknown. Indeed she knew a little now. The man was not an Italian noble, otherwise the telegram would have said so. It must have been written by Lilia. None but she would have been guilty of the fatuous vulgarity of "Italian nobility." She recalled phrases of this morning's letter: "We love this place—Caroline is sweeter than ever, and busy sketching—Italians full of simplicity and charm." And the remark of Baedeker, ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... the room 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 ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of their dispensations. What man of forty-three ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... 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 that unless he exercised his authority, and that of ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... of conduct absolutely and very far removed from practical life; but he had never seen them practice it save to their own financial (not moral—he would not say that) destruction. They were never significant, practical men who clung to these fatuous ideals. They were always poor, nondescript, negligible dreamers. He could not have made Stener understand all this if he had wanted to, and he certainly did not want to. It was too bad about Mrs. Stener and the little Steners. No doubt she had worked hard, as had ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... went abroad. But Phipps was forbidden the house, and with such a handicap as that he surely was out of the running. Besides, Miss Eleanor had probably forgotten all about the Captain by this time! Thus reassuring himself, the fatuous Quin loosened the reins of his fancy and rode full tilt for an ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... years you will not know the house over yonder. Despite its fancied ghosts and death-dealing fireplace, it will stand A Number One in Washington. I, David Moore, promise you this; and I am not a man to utter fatuous prophecies. But I must be missed over there." Here he gave the mastiff the long delayed kick. "Rudge, stay here! The vestibule opposite is icy. Besides, your howls are not wanted in those old walls tonight even if you would go with me, which I doubt. ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... hoboes, the womanless, jobless, voteless men. To him their tragedy was akin to the tragedy of child-life in our commercialized cities. More often than of anything else, he used to talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization that centred its economic activities in places where child-life was perpetually repressed and imperiled. The last time I saw him he was flaming indignation at the ghastly record of children killed ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... 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 will be some from ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... such a true picture of the Second Empire in its decline; yet, beyond any other books have the quality that alone makes novels historical. That they include everything, that they do justice to all sides and phases of the period, it would be fatuous to expect, and ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical character alone that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of art, which must choose its point of view, and include only the things that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish itself, for it postpones the happiness of each existing generation to the fancied good of future generations which may never be born, and this ad infinitum. On this part of his subject Mr. Mill is simply fatuous, as when he speaks of our being sustained in this faith by the approbation of the dead whom we venerate. But if Socrates and Howard and Washington and Christ and Antoninus and Mrs. Mill are turned to clay, as he says they probably are, it is nonsense to assert that he is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... 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 ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... such as these, which, if really intended by the architect, would imply an utterly fatuous habit of concealing elaborately what he desired to symbolise, the pyramidalists base their belief that 'a Mighty Intelligence did both think out the plans for it, and compel unwilling and ignorant idolators, in a primal age of the world, to work mightily both for the future glory of the one true ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... have sneered at this strain in another as hyperbolical and fatuous. The absurdity of it in his mouth consisted mainly in the cool arrogance of the assumption that whatever belonged to him was above adverse criticism, and would be maligned if it were referred to without appending an encomium. Much of fervor might ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the disadvantage of the "John." Spitta, indeed, goes further than this. So bent is he on proving the superiority of the "Matthew" that what he sees as a masterstroke in that work is in the "John" a gross blunder; and, on the whole, the pages on the "John" Passion are precisely the most fatuous of the many fatuous pages he wrote when he plunged into artistic criticism, leaving his own proper element of technical or historical criticism. This is a pity, for Spitta really had a very good case to spoil. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... with amusement, not wholly unmixed with some less complimentary emotion, the complacent and wholly fatuous letter of James Wilson MacPhail which has lately appeared in your columns upon the subject of the blurring of Fraunhofer's lines in the spectra both of the planets and of the fixed stars. He dismisses the matter as of no significance. ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... them were quite innocent and as fatuous as dreams are wont to be, but even these innocent dreams fretted the soul of the waking man, for in every scrap and vestige of them he recognized the mind of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... affected Dominic 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 own heart. For a long while he listened ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... 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 when all "claptrap" was ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... waiting, and shuffled slowly out of the door. When the last guest had gone, he rose from his chair, with no pretence of spiritual dignity, and counted his money and his tickets. He stretched himself in two chairs, drew his fingers admiringly through his lank locks, while a fatuous grin of perfect content spread over his face, as he said aloud to himself, "She has got it bad. I wonder whether she will have the nerve to ask me. I'll wait awhile, anyhow. I'll lose nothing ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... have noticed one little fault about you. I will not call it fatuous, inane, and exasperating vanity or self- absorption; I will put it in the form of a parable. Sit you round attentively and listen, dispersing yourselves all in order, and do ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... merely existed but was the paramount influence in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the German-speaking peoples labour—illusions which necessarily led the German national will into conflict with the will of the other European nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of Prussia ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... than any one else, and that the chances will be all in my favour. From first to last there has not been a word spoken between us which old Branston himself might not hear. As to Adela's marrying again when he is gone, he could scarcely be so fatuous as not to foresee the probability ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... 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 more emphatic. The Queen thought the King perfectly right in refusing his personal ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... 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 ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... really something lacking in him, or was it not something lacking in her? He flushed at the disloyalty of the thought and put it from him; but, as his memory reached back over the past three months, the question returned again and again with fresh force, and would not be denied. He called himself a fatuous, conceited fool. Because he could not make a woman love him other men could do so. That was really the answer; he was not the man. But the answer did not seem final. What, after all, was the thing his love sought—a woman only, or a woman capable of deep ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after-dinner speaker who rambles on and on and on while the victims yawn, groan, or fold their napkins and silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... quite fatuous element in the programmes of the militant suffragist. We have this element, for instance, in the doctrine that, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions of the labour market deny it to her, woman ought to receive the same wage as a man ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... enraptured smile 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
... warm corner in his heart for the Roman Catholic Irish. He has not a word to say for himself about the campaign in Belgium, but he still has many wise, reproachful words to utter about the campaign in South Africa. I propose to take those words out of his mouth. I will have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench pretensions that our governors always govern well, that our statesmen are never whitewashed and never in need of whitewash. The only moral superiority I claim is that of not defending the indefensible. I most earnestly urge my countrymen not to hide behind thin official ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... reception committee were lined up in all their glory. Jane's quick glance discerned Marian Seaton, resplendent in an elaborate gown of pale blue satin, standing at the far end of the line. Her usually arrogant features wore an expression of fatuous complacency. It took wing the instant she ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed, quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very air—ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the best authors, will be found, we trust, efficient guides for the composition of genuine poems. But the tyro must bear always in mind that there is no royal road to anything, and that not even the most explicit directions will make a poet all at once of even the most fatuous, the most sentimental, or the ...
— Every Man His Own Poet - Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book • Newdigate Prizeman
... in Horace; to gain a 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 felicitas, of no poet can it be more truly said, in the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of his youth) "polish his teeth on thy bones!" I cried at last in despair. That shocking heathen curse silenced him, but for the next two hours, whenever I looked at the creature, I saw his lips moving and a silly, fatuous expression on his by no means unintelligent face. I never took him out with me again, although he sent me fowls and other things as bribes to ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the whole of the story. Any man in America or anywhere else who 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 Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... when those fatuous asses hauled me up for trespassing they left me in the charge of a gamekeeper while they 'phoned for the police. I induced the chap to let me go, and I had to square him ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... they have been trained to esteem above all else in the world. As it was, those last few months of anxiety—Mrs. Whitney worrying lest her luxury and social leadership should be passing, Ross exasperated by the daily struggle to dissuade his father from fatuous enterprises—had changed Whitney's death from a grief to a relief. However, "appearances" constrained Ross to a decent show of sorrow, compelled Mrs. Whitney to a still stronger exhibit. Janet, who in far-away France ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... de Montcalm, the newly appointed commander of the forces in Canada, arrived about the middle of May, bringing with him the Chevalier de Levis, Bourlamaque, and Bougainville, all of them better generals than those to whom the fatuous Duke of Newcastle entrusted the leadership of the English army. Montcalm himself is indeed one of the most heroic and gallant figures in French Canadian history—the personage, par excellence, of the closing chapter of ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... brightest minds in England loved to gather became mere Barmecide feasts when reported to us without a single amusing remark, such waifs and strays of conversation as reached our ears being of the dreariest and most fatuous description. It is not so with the real masters of their craft. Mr. Peacock does not stop to explain to us that Doctor Folliott is witty. The reverend gentleman opens his mouth and acquaints us with the fact himself. There is no need for George Eliot to expatiate on Mrs. Poyser's humor. Five minutes ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... gentleman trotting at a young girl's heels is a most unedifying spectacle—giving occasion, and reasonably, to the enemy to blaspheme—bad for her in numberless ways; and, if he's any remnant of self-respect left in him, is anything better than a fatuous dotard, damnably bad for him ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... all its mysteries—in the stalk, in the 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... 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 meet her eyes fully. By ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and look wise. His vile wisdom is made the viler by his vile rheuminess. The bowing and cringing, time-serving old sinner—is such an one to give manly precepts to youth? The discreet, decorous, old dotard-of-state; senile prudence; fatuous soullessness! The ribanded old dog is paralytic all down one side, and that the side of nobleness. His soul is gone out. Only nature's automatonism keeps him on his legs. As with some old trees, the bark survives the pith, and ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... as an attitude of mind—but this evening it warmed into something concrete. "There's plenty of little dicky-birds haven't got such a nest as my two," he said to the twins, who failed to see that this speech, which they wriggled over, but privately thought fatuous, had the elements ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... at his solemn face that simmered with excited egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing—playing in his ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling movement, to find a chair for himself. He was sitting on it now, close beside his mother, and she was ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... life is mere folly, mere fatuous nonsense. The truth is that our dogs do not bark always at the right moment. For instance, when I said to folk, 'How would it be if we were to open a technical school for girls?' They merely laughed and replied, 'Trade workers are hopeless drunkards. Already ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... divine. The man to win her is he who calls loudly for his drink, without a "Please" or a "Thank 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
... eyes sparkled with a mingling of gratified malice and undisguised contempt for the fatuous father beside her. But before she could accept or decline the challenge, it had become useless. A murmur of youthful voices struck her ear, and she suddenly stood upright and transfixed in the carriage. For lounging down slowly towards them out of the ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... emotion. But it was not so with us. The child seemed the very thing we had been needing without knowing it. It was a constant source of interest and delight; and in spite of Cynthia's attempts to keep it ignorant and even fatuous, it did develop a very charming intelligence, or rather, as I soon saw, began to perceive what it already knew. It soon overwhelmed us with questions, and used to patter about the garden with me, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my goo' flien'," chanted each of these apparitions; and each, after a long, slow discourse that ended more darkly than it began, retired with fatuous nods and smirks of satisfaction, leaving Rudolph dismayed by a sense of cryptic negotiation in which he ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music—neither of them knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that she might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a book, would have struck me as merely fatuous. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... one of those fatuous women whose eagerness to make a point excludes the consideration even of their own advantage. "I'm sure," she said, as if speaking for the upper classes, "we haven't got any individuality at all. We are as like as so many peas or pins. In fact, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... the Swan, stricken with the folly of strong drink, met all Standish's expostulations with a fatuous laugh, and the declaration that there was no danger,—no danger whatever; that he and the Indians were such friends that he carried no arms, and never closed the gates of the stockade; that all the stories reaching Plymouth were lies or blunders; and that although they were short of provisions, ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... said in simple woe and bewilderment. "I don't understand any of it. How could—how could they want to hurt me!" Her innocence was so fatuous that she thought that because she had been kind to them they could not hate ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... mere promise would be a fatuous superfluity. If you say 'No Indian wife,' that's enough for me. I suppose I must rest content with the high privilege ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... this last unlucky line. Again, in the next scene, when the popular leader Captain Brett attempts to reassure the country folk who are startled at the sight of his insurgent array, he is made to utter (in reply to the exclamation, "What's here? soldiers!") the perfectly fatuous phrase, "Fear not good speech." Of course—once more—we should read, "Fear not, good people"; a correction which rectifies the metre as well as ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... bottommost secret of thought and action, but would not let escape so much as the smallest hint of what was really engaging his whole mind. It was this discovery that had set her to disregarding his seeming of colossal, of fatuous egotism, and had started her toward an estimate of him wholly different from the current estimate. Now, was he thinking of their future, or was it some other matter that occupied his real mind while he talked on and on, usually of himself? ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... re-opened and set bleeding afresh by Governor Abbott's treatment of the Citizens' Committee. Whatever lingering hope had remained in his mind of peace with honor for the troubled capital of Alleghenia, seemed to have been effectually dispelled by that interview. The most enduring charity, the most fatuous credulity, the blindest partisanship—even these could not have preserved a last spark of confidence in Elijah Abbott. Still less was Barclay's indeterminate hope of the ultimate triumph of right able to stand ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Canal. This sudden incursion of an Oriental potentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect that illustrious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony. The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to be naturally so selected; the only other Norwegian guest being Professor J. D. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the body and rowelled with sharp spurs about the neck and face because of the great sensitiveness of his military colleague. This gossip of the inland Campo, so characteristic of the rulers of the country with its story of oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods, treachery, and savage brutality, was perfectly known to Mrs. Gould. That it should be accepted with no indignant comment by people of intelligence, refinement, and character as something ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... motive jars the buoyant spring. Through the maze of fugue with tinge of terror presses the fatuous chase, when—crash comes the shock of higher power. There is a pause of motion in the din and a downward flight as ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... 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 ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... 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 ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... was again, this fatuous intolerance! this incomprehensible provincialism! And the terrible part of it was that he had suddenly the sensation of being overwhelmed by the weight of it, of being smothered under a mountain of prejudice. The flame of his anger against Cyrus went ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... I had grown fatuous, for I had taken it without question that the oaf had followed from his loyalty to me. But I nodded at him and promised recklessly—house, pigs, and granary. The same star ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it. Acting otherwise proved always disastrous in the past, and it is simply fatuous to-day. Every system which would escape the fate of an organism too rigid to adjust itself to its environment, must be plastic to the extent that the growth of knowledge demands. When 'this truth has been thoroughly taken in, rigidity ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a book: "It is half like himself;" If I speak, 't is for vanity's sake. What I build in the stage-world of fancy's free elf Is but formed from my fatuous self. When for faith I contend And our land's ancient ways, When the bridge I defend From our fathers' great days, 'Tis because my poor breast no king's ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... 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
... ago, an exasperating, soft-headed boy brought a colossal fortune into the Ring. I never pitied him much; I only longed to see him placed in the hands of a good schoolmaster who knew how to use a birch. This piteous wretch, with his fatuous airs of sharpness, was exactly the kind of game that the bookmakers cared to fly at; he was cajoled and stimulated; he was trapped at every turn; the vultures flapped round him; and there was no strong, wise man to give the booby counsel or to drag him by main force from his fate. There ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the night when he had lost the race at the ice-carnival. The same chandelier hung above them, some portion of the same plate, even, repurchased by Dirk, was on the table, but how different were the company and the feast! Aunt Clara, the fatuous, was long dead, and with her many of the companions of that occasion, some naturally, some by the hand of the executioner, while others had fled the land. Pieter van de Werff still lived, however, and though regarded with suspicion by the authorities, was a man of weight ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Session, a packet was put into his hands from the English Queen containing intercepted treasonable letters from the Popish lords in Scotland to the King of Spain and the Duke of Parma, and accompanied by the following letter in Elizabeth's own hand, in which she rates him for his fatuous lenity towards subjects who had joined hands with the enemies of ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... Egyptians, more fatuous and foolish than they, have erred worse than any other nation. They were not satisfied with the idols worshipped by the Chaldeans and Greeks, but further introduced as gods brute beasts of land and water, and herbs and trees, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... be seen that, the stuff of Mr. Jerome's play is sufficiently fatuous; but Mr. Edmund Maurice as The Colonel was always amusing, and in the multitude of counsellors there was merriment. Unfortunately Mr. Stanley Cooke, as a Herr Professor and leader of the chorus, did not quite succeed in executing his share of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... predecessor and master, the Prince of Astronomers, as he is called, Tycho Brahe, kept an idiot in his presence, fed him from his own table, with his own hand, and listened to his incoherent, unmeaning, and fatuous expressions as to a revelation from the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... occurred to me then, I would have taken any risk rather than make my escape by that way.... Oh, well!" he went on more coolly, "I suppose that to any one who didn't know her the idea of her being privy to her husband's murder might not seem so indescribably fatuous. Forgive the expression." He looked attentively at the burning end of his cigarette, studiously unconscious of the red flag that flew in Trent's eyes for an instant at his words and ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... use them? No. After one ball, in the negotiation of which neither your bat, nor your pads, nor your gloves came into play, they send you back into the pavilion to spend the rest of the afternoon listening to fatuous stories of some old gentleman who knew Fuller Pilch. And when your side takes the field, where are you? Probably at long leg both ends, exposed to the public gaze as the worst fieldsman in London. How devastating are your ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... of dealing with this man or his fatuous attacks in a respectable publication save that he has been appointed the "System's" chief defender. It really seems as though the game were too small to take time for its killing, but as these weak and febrile maunderings really represent the "System's" ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... very kind of you to think so." He laughed rather contemptuously. "What a fatuous idiot I should be if I believed you. But—to go back to what we were talking about—it really is in a way rather a pity you're gradually dropping everybody like that. It seems to me that one should either have a cosy, clever, interesting little set of amusing and really intimate friends; ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... 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
... peculiarities of Meshach Myatt. William Twemlow had been one of those men in whom an unbridled appetite for virtue becomes a vice. He loved God with such virulence that he killed his wife, drove his daughter into a fatuous marriage, and quarrelled irrevocably with his son. The too sensitive wife died for lack of joy; Alice escaped to Australia with a parson who never accomplished anything but a large family; and Arthur, at the age of seventeen, precociously cursed his father and sought in America a land ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... from the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to d'Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the latter against the common enemy. Several other women also chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that attempt was ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... staunch supporter of the Government, who were already inclined to be belligerent, and "England's honour" was therefore the legend under which he selected to do battle. It may, however, be doubted whether there was in all Barchester one inhabitant—let alone one elector—so fatuous as to suppose that England's honour was in any special manner dear to Mr Moffat; or that he would be a whit more sure of a big loaf than he was now, should Sir Roger happily become a member ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... 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 accompany ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... amid the tragedy of war. We have a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists, and apt to see things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past—the "sinking" of the Lion, the "capture" of Fort Vaux, or the "bombardment" of Liverpool docks—is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing else, forbids—the instinct of an old people with an old and humourous literature. These leading articles of the Hamburger ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... freezing on his cheeks, Parker gave himself up to the fatuous comfort of the man ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... thought to have at this date: no one knew that better than himself. And as long as he was with Louise, he kept it at bay; it was a fatuous thing even to allow himself to think, considering the past, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... time that evening, and when he joined his wife and sister-in-law in the drawing-room he went at once to Betty. In fact, he was in the condition when a man cannot keep away from a woman, but must invent some reason for reaching her whether it is fatuous or plausible. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was married?" I admitted that this information had eluded me, when he added in the fatuous manner of such victims of a purely automatic process, "To Miss ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you 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 real thing ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... of her he was sure also that there was room for infinite joy. He compared her in his mind to Catherine Bailey, and could not but feel that in his youth he had been blind and fatuous. Catherine had been a fair-haired girl, and had now blossomed out into the anxious mother of ten fair-haired children. The anxiety had no doubt come from the evil courses of her husband. Had she been contented to be Mrs Whittlestaff, ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... reported by affidavits; and if satisfied of the prima facie evidence, he issued a writ de idiota or lunatico inquirendo to the escheator or sheriff of his county to try the case by jury. The form of this writ was various. It surmised that an idiot or fatuous person existed, one who had not sufficient power to govern himself, his lands, tenements, goods, or cattle, and ordered inquiry to be made whether such was really the fact, and if so, whether at another time; if the latter, at what time, and by what means; if there were lucid intervals; and who ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... elected an honorary member of a night club to which undoubted gentlemen resort. There she occasionally consents to dance; more often she sups to an accompaniment of Viennese music, loud and mirthless laughter, jests which are as fatuous as they are suggestive, and wine which, unlike the humour of the plated youths, her companions, is always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... this? A 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
... best suited 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 ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... than that of the most fatuous of freedoms, as he felt directly he had spoken that it might have seemed to her; and before he had even time to welcome the relief of not having then himself, for beastly contrition, to make more of it, she had simply mentioned, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... thousand hostile troops and Indians only eighteen miles beyond the river Raisin. The Kentuckians left with him decided matters for themselves. They insisted on marching to the support of their comrades at Frenchtown. Meanwhile General Harrison had learned of this fatuous division of strength and was hastening to the base at the falls of the Maumee. There he found only three hundred men. All the others had gone with Winchester to reinforce the men at Frenchtown. It was too late to summon troops from other ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... Brookhollow 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
... Bridget, however, quite good-humouredly refused to entertain any suggestion of the kind, protesting that she had done enough for one morning. With these mitigations, Colonel Faversham's glee appeared fatuous. Always disposed to boast of his capacity to vie with men a quarter of a century younger than himself, he had never, surely, done so well as now! He went to Donaldson's for a diamond ring, which was put on Bridget's ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... sought, the weaknesses of Goethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The one civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their beautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was, there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his half sceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain of teacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans. Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never got into his philosophy. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonic idealism, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... at the close of the day's trading, he took much comfort in it as an omen of the morrow. That night, however, he took but little satisfaction in Uncle Peter's renewed assurances of trust in his acumen. Uncle Peter, he decided all at once, was a fatuous, doddering old man, unable to realise that the whole fortune was gravely endangered. And with the gambler's inveterate hope that luck must change he forbore ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... naive stupidity and sublime simplicity was the wondering theme and inexhaustible delight of the whole barracks. Stories were told of his genius for blundering which rivaled Handy Andy's; old stories of fatuous ignorance were rearranged and fitted to "our Karl." It was "our Karl" who, on receiving a tip of two marks from the hands of a young lady to whom he had brought the bouquet of a gallant lieutenant, exhibited some hesitation, and finally said, "Yes, but, gnadiges Fraulein, that COST us nine marks!" ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... course, the 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
... more look at the unconscious and fatuous Everett, and went out of the room. Twenty feet away, as he knew, sat his grandfather, ready and able to smash the candidate's dreams and chances as a child bursts a soap-bubble. And the man's money—thrown to the winds ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... to afflict our most cherished plans when they are at last divulged, when we suddenly feel that there is nothing there to talk about, and as the golden dream slips through our fingers we are left to wonder at our own fatuous belief. But gradually the comfort of Miss Starr's companionship, the vigor and enthusiasm which she brought to bear upon it, told both in the growth of the plan and upon the sense of its validity, so that by the time we had reached the enchantment ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... 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 his compelling ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. "Yes, that's it!" he cried in a certain excitement. "Can't you see it in the man's face? Why, look ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... their own boiling anger against the enemy, would sometimes peevishly inquire: "Does he really hate Germany?" The President was too much occupied with deeds to waste time in word- vapouring. By every honourable means he had sought to avoid the issue, but a truculent and fatuous foe had made war necessary, and into that war the peace-loving President went with the grim resolution of an iron warrior. In his attitude before and during the war his motto might have been the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... old girl," 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 ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... making a mistake; but he never realized it with such painful clearness as he did this evening. He was filled with a sort of blind terror. He cursed the fate which had taken him to the Charity-Bazaar at which he had first come under the notice of Lady Kimbuck. The fatuous snobbishness which had made him leap at her invitation to spend a few days at Evenwood Towers he regretted; but for that he blamed himself less. Further acquaintance with Lady Kimbuck had convinced him that if she had wanted him, she would have got him somehow, ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... the passing year In many-colored tints its course has run Through days with shadows dark, or bright with sun, But hope has triumphed over doubt and fear, New radiance flows from stars that grace our flag. Our fate we ventured, though full dark the night, And faced the fatuous host who trusted might. God called, the country's lovers could not lag, Serenely trustful, danger grave despite, Untrained, in love with peace, they dared to fight, And freed a threatened world from peril dire, Establishing ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... curious and unaccountable things, and they do not by any means invariably come true. There are two gates through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them. I do not think, however, that my own dream came through the gate of horn, though I and my son should be most thankful if it proves to have done so. Furthermore I say—and lay my saying to your heart—the ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... thunderstorm, the concoction was served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through the Lucia fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff before she ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... purposes. I can see 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, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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
... fine, resonant and melodious snore, but it is not going to last: there is to be a rude awakening. We shall one day get our eyes open to the fact that scoundrels like Vaillant are neither few nor distant. We shall learn that our blind dependence upon the magic of words is a fatuous error; that the fortuitous arrangement of consonants and vowels which we worship as Liberty is of slight efficacy in disarming the lunatic brandishing a bomb. Liberty, indeed! The murderous wretch loves it a deal better than we, and wants ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... leaving school. This ode, so fondly cherished, so beautiful—since it was the outpouring of all the love in his heart, seemed to him to be the one piece of his own work that could hold its own with Chenier's verse; and with a tolerably fatuous glance at Mme. de Bargeton, he announced "TO HER!" He struck an attitude proudly for the delivery of the ambitious piece, for his author's self-love felt safe and at ease behind Mme. de Bargeton's petticoat. And ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac |
