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More "Fatuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... not take seriously. She did not dream that a possible menace to herself lay in this stout man whom she considered fatuous and absurd, when she thought of him at all. That her mother should be completely taken in by his specious charity and his plausible presentment of himself, did not surprise her. She was inclined to smile scornfully and so ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... wandering in youth and innocence among the shells; to be obliged to think of Ursula Dearmer's mother when you would much rather not think of her; to be profoundly and irrevocably angry with the guileless Commandant, whom at the moment you regard (it may be perversely) as the prime agent in this fatuous sacrifice of women's lives; to want to stop it and to be unable to stop it, and at the same time to feel a brute because you want to stop it—when they are enjoying the adventure—I can only say of the experience that I hope there ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... first time display its true character and significance. Liberals who 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 when all "claptrap" was laid aside, the "real stuff" of Liberalism—its ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... peppered and salted them and then giving for a background a real New Jersey 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
... feed them? Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... fatuous to contend that the prime object of a work of architecture is to obey and illustrate these laws. The prime object of a work of architecture is to fulfill certain definite conditions in a practical, economical, and admirable way, and in fulfilling ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... course 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 have ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... sense of humour, and the irony of his situation was not lost on him. He took a grim, ferocious delight in calling up the might-have-beens and the 'fatuous ineffectual yesterdays' of life. There is a certain sardonic satisfaction to be gleaned from a frank recognition of the fact that you are the architect of your own misfortune. He felt that satisfaction, and laughed at Darkey, who was one of those who moan about 'ill-luck' ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... her visit, a tactful anticipation of any situation which might make their stay impossible. The evening dragged hopelessly and the ladies retired early, while at the foot of the stair I made some fatuous remark about Jerry's possibly having been summoned to town. The "good-nights" were said with an excess of cheerfulness on Una's part and my own which did nothing to conceal from either of us the real ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... we had a glimpse of cells where fouler deeds were being done than modesty permits to mention, and which caused my companion to snatch me away in anger from this fatuous court into the princess' treasury (for we went where we list notwithstanding doors and locks). There we saw myriads of fair women, all kinds of beverages, fruits and dainties, stringed instruments and books ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... the 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. And all this ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... side on the thawing heap of snow, he gave himself up to the pleasure of the sensation of warmth, forgetful of danger, forgetful of all things else in the world. In spite of himself his face expanded with an almost fatuous expression of satisfaction, and he waited impatiently till the scrap of horseflesh that had fallen to his soldier's share should be cooked. The smell of charred flesh stimulated his hunger. Hunger clamored within and silenced his heart, his courage, and his ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... of the Yordas freaks was a fatuous and generally fatal one. For the slightest miscarriage they discharged their lawyer, and leaped into the office of a new one. Has any man moved in the affairs of men, with a grain of common-sense or half a pennyweight of experience, without being taught that an old tenter-hook sits ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... 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 will be relaxed, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... with the somewhat fatuous, self-conscious grin that no amount of intelligence can keep out of the face of a good-looking fellow who knows that ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by. (4) No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair - if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... own weakness—as was too often the case with the giddy maidens whom he had known through Demorest's companionship. It was, therefore, more with a sense of recalling this distinctive quality of his wife than any loyalty to Demorest that he suddenly resolved to confide to her the latter's fatuous folly. ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... collective response to that warning, I see a multitude of little chaps crawling about their private ends like mites in an old cheese. The kings are still in their places, not a royal prince has been killed in this otherwise universal slaughter; when the fatuous portraits of the monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and orphans still break into loyal song. The ten thousand religions of mankind are still ten thousand religions, all busy at keeping men ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... generation at the door were always, as it assumes, 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
... he's not fatuous, though he's so good-looking. He's not a lady-killing sort of person or anything ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... been shot the whole length of his body, the bullet entering at the shoulder and emerging behind the hip. A small boy sat scratching. Jo said to him, "Why dost thou scratch?" He answered with a shout of fatuous content, "I have lice, I have lice," and scratched ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... again,'" echoed the Jinnee, with an admiration that was almost fatuous. "Divinely gifted truly was he who composed ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... how to attack and adopt open-side tactics when necessary. Once the teams have re-learnt these lessons, the games will automatically do so. In the days of Jordan, Mackinnon and Green we won as many matches by our forwards as by our outsides. It is fatuous to develop one division at the expense of the other. The outsides are going this season to receive all possible attention, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... 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 ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... every side, could thus—! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face, and think on no more. But this morning everything I met seemed to be accounted for and set in tune by that same magical touch in the air; and it was with a certain surprise that I found myself regarding these fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by, unheeded of them. There was indeed some reconciling influence abroad, which could bring the like antics into harmony with bud and growth ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... celebrated because they were preposterous. 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. ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... 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 of the accused ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... 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 as suddenly stop, arrested ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... 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, and had filled up the intervening ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... She suspected that he was promising a miracle he could not perform, counting upon an influencing factor that did not exist. "Was he fatuous enough to believe that Jemima loved him? Her fears for her child's happiness suddenly became fears for the happiness of this life-long friend. She felt that ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... even 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
... the soul of a martyr; she had resigned herself to sinking down into the star of cousin Ward's set, who went on holidays to the play—mostly honest, fat and fatuous, or jaunty and egotistical folk, who admired the scenery and the dresses, but could no more have made a play to themselves than they could have drawn the cartoons. She helped cousin Ward, not only with her purse, but with a kinswoman's concern in her and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... wouldn't hear of his being yet beyond precautions she had gone into the house for a particular shawl that was just the thing for his knees, and, blinking in the watery sunshine, had come back with it across the fine little lawn. He was neither fatuous nor asinine, but he had almost to put it to himself as a small task to resist the sense of his absurd advantage with her. It filled him with horror and awkwardness, made him think of he didn't know what, recalled something of Maupassant's— the smitten ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... if she knew, then, he was to speak to me of coming, and whether I might allude to him, whether it was not too delicate. I shall never forget his answer to this, nor the tone in which he made it, blushing a little, and looking away. "Allude to me? Rather!" It was not the most fatuous speech I had ever heard; it had the effect of being the most modest; and it gave me an odd idea, and especially a new one, of the condition in which, at any time, one might be destined to find Lady Vandeleur. If she, too, were engaged in a struggle with her conscience (in this light ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... 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
... 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 interest ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... languishes. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer put up titles to auction, while abolishing the legislative function of the Lords, there would be millions in it. But as we English are not logical, our mending would probably resolve itself into fatuous tinkering. We might get rid of the sons, but leave the fathers. We might flood the Lords with life peers, but leave the veto. Such tactics are too Britannic. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... those you know with exaggerated enthusiasm and being the conscious subject of whispered criticism and inquiry on the part of the others. You make your way to the side of a lady whom you have previously encountered at a similar entertainment and assert your delight at revamping the fatuous acquaintanceship. Her facetiousness is elephantine, but the relief of conversation is such that you laugh loudly at her witticisms and simper knowingly at her platitudes—both of which have now been current for ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... 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 ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... whose shores are arid indeed. But I know that there are often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking words even when pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe my ears, but already boiling with indignation, I ran out of the cabin ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... dreary men expending precisely the same energy on teaching a dog to walk on its hind-legs as would brighten the whole colour of their own lives, I feel as if I wanted to give up the ghost, so ridiculous, so fatuous does the spectacle seem! But, of course, I do not give up the ghost. The paroxysm passes. Only I really must cry out: 'Can't you see what you're missing? Can't you see that you're missing the most interesting thing on earth, far more interesting ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... of it. It wasn't that Sandeman mattered. To the devil with Sandeman! But what would his future father-in-law think? He had never before given way to any show of ill-temper before him. He forced himself into a mood of rather fatuous jocularity. Adela was at her best in those moods. They would have lots of fun together in the days to come. Her almost pretty, not too clever face was dimpled with kittenish glee. Life was a tremendous rag to her. They were expecting ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • 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 that she ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... in drawing a bound we are aware of more. But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite space is ridiculous. It resembles infinite space secundum quid, or in but one respect,—its spatial quality. We believe it homogeneous with whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country, that to have it is to have them. The further points of space are as numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar, and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... was most decided about it. I had no hope and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to be a bounder—and a fatuous bounder at that—I couldn't tell her that she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that she had given me anything. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... serious play in his life, build a temple for the drama, but there are no plays, no actors, no audience, nothing is accomplished. There is no critical body of real lovers of the drama, and there are no cheap seats, and there is still that fatuous notion that exclusiveness, except in the trifling matter of physical propinquity, can be bought ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... At any rate, there she was, more touching, pathetic, striking, to my eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and touching lovers as ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... do-nothingism, these counsels of sitting still for fear something would happen, these counsels addressed to the hopeful, energetic people of the United States, telling them that they are not wise enough to touch their own affairs without marring them, constitute the most extraordinary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. Americans are not yet cowards. True, their self-reliance has been sapped by years of submission to the doctrine that prosperity is something that benevolent magnates provide for them with the aid of the government; their self-reliance ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... against the triflings of the Sophists; though meanwhile that sophistical science has to have its ineptitude propped up and fortified by papal and imperial privileges.... So then, you wormy and lousy Sophist, since you deem the monarch of Arcana a mere ignorant, fatuous, and prodigal quack, now, in this mid age, I determine in my present treatise to disclose the honourable course of procedure in these matters, the virtues and preparation of the celebrated Tincture of the Philosophers for the use and honour of all who love the truth, and in order ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... 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 ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... upright and 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 him ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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 interest with us,' continued ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... occasion, how, after making my hearers cry over the natural and permanent tragedy of Shylock, I asked the fatuous question, addressing it, as one ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... eye-sight; drew a seer out of a well, etc, etc. Many scholars follow Bergaigne in imagining all these miracles to be anthropomorphized forms of solar phenomena, the healing of the blind representing the bringing out of the sun from darkness, etc. To us such interpretation often seems fatuous. No less unconvincing is the claim that one of the Acvins represents the fire of heaven and the other the fire of the altar. The Twins are called n[a]saty[a], the 'savers' (or 'not untrue ones[113]'); explained by some as meaning 'gods ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... 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 ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... 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 ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Follow, O, follow me! Follow, exulting In the great light that breaks From the sacred Companionship! Thrust through the fatuous, Thrust through the fungous brood, Spawned in my shadow And gross with my gift! Thrust through, and hearken O, hark, to the Trumpet, The Virgin of Battles, Calling, still calling you Into the Presence, Sons of the Judgment, Pure wafts of the Will! Edged ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... 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" reply to my charges, it may ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... an inkling of affairs. My letters say he chafes at my delay, Not mine, but thine, thou dull and fatuous House— Which, in a period that whips delay, When men should spur themselves and flash in action, Let'st idly leak the unpurchasable hours From our scant measure of ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... ludicrous as it may seem to you, I can't but feel that I understand you a great deal better than she does. She still thinks of you as a child—a child whose little problems can be solved by facile solutions. Forgive me, I know it may sound fatuous to you, but I see what she does not see, that you are a suffering woman, and that for some problems there are no solutions." His eyes now came back to hers and found them fixed on him with a wide ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... from death. The representation in the parable, however, is true to nature and fact: it would be a mistake to attribute to a miser a high appreciation of the dignity of man. Covetousness, in its more advanced stages, eats the pith out of the understanding, and leaves its victim almost fatuous. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... a thrush's, and the voice of a siren, and the red lips of Hebe—will be invited to reign as l'ambassadrice! If I am not as mad with jealous despair as Othello, attribute my escape either to a sublime faith in your adorable constancy and incorruptibility, or to my own colossal vanity, fatuous beyond absolution." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... on top of the overturned boat, and dragged me up after him. Together we hauled up Brown, who could not swim but was bombastically furious and unafraid; and the three of us pulled out the porters and the fatuous boat's owner. The pole was floating near by, and I swam down-stream and fetched it. When they had dragged me back on to the wreck the moon came out, and we saw the far bank hazily through mist ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... went to the door to clean some extra mud off his boot tops, and to hide a wide and fatuous smile at the thought of tricking Silas out of his accustomed joke. He felt nearer the girl, because she too had been silent regarding the afternoon encounter. He liked the mutuality of it and resolved that it should ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... Linton sat up in bed. "Pneumonia!" he exclaimed. Well, Jerry was getting exactly what he deserved. He had called him, Tom, an "old fool," a "dam' old fool," to be precise. The epithet in itself meant nothing—it was in fact a fatuous and feeble term of abuse as compared to the opprobrious titles which he and Jerry were in the habit of exchanging—it was that abominable adjective which hurt. Jerry and he had called each other ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... god 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 teach him ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... 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 ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... 1853, when conservatives and clericals indulged the fatuous hope that he would both sustain their privileges and lift Mexico out of its sore distress. Either their memories were short or else distance had cast a halo about his figure. At all events, he returned ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... 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 ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... possible by the 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 ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ago! His men ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... long ceased to be a component element of the 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 ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... 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 knocked to pieces by builders would, through his ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... under his great, jovial, black-mustached face, the creature yet moved on little feet like a spinning-top on its point, buoyantly, with the gait of a tethered balloon. He had the gestures, the attitude upon the threshold, of a jolly companion; when he turned, his huge, fatuous face was amiable, and creased yet with the dregs of smiles. From the breast of his jacket he exhumed a white handkerchief. "Arrivederci!" he called for the last time to the interior of the house; someone within answered pleasantly; then deliberately, with a suggestion of ceremonial ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... after drunkenness and dissipation on the husband's side, and finally his death, came the approach of poverty. Mrs. Carter was not practical, and still passionate and inclined to dissipation. However, the aimless, fatuous going to pieces of Ira George Carter, the looming pathos of the future of the children, and a growing sense of affection and responsibility had finally sobered her. The lure of love and life had not entirely disappeared, but her chance of sipping ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... was a clever child and fond of her lessons, but she was full of droll fancies. She always insisted on her dolls joining our studies. It used to be a little embarrassing to me at first to see myself surrounded by the vacant waxen faces staring at us, with every variety of smirk and bland fatuous expression: the flaxen heads nid-nodded over open lesson-books, propped up in limp, leathery arms. When Flossy grew impatient for a game of play, he would drag two or three of them down with a vicious snap and a ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... I have done now; and, in any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with another Bronte book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly never meant to write so long ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... and left 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 announcement on ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... his fatuous smile. 'That's just what I say,' he answered. 'Why the jooce introduce them? But don't ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... thoroughly crushed, after one or two more fatuous remarks moved away, and Zara arose in her character of hostess, and spoke ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... succeeding" [my italics]. Oh, triple modesty! The violet-like beauty of that word "quite"! Thus he tried perhaps too hard and too often to produce something beautiful! Not that for a moment I believe the excellent Mr. Benson to be so fatuous as these phrases, like scores of others in the book, would indicate. It is merely that heaven has been pleased to deprive him of any glimmer of humour, and that he is the victim of a style which, under an appearance of neatness and efficiency and honesty, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... irrational, silly, imbecile, witless, insensate, weak-minded, half-witted, brainless, fatuous, fatuitous, insagacious, unintelligent; indiscreet, imprudent, ridiculous, absurd, asinine, inept, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Linda—an admiration that drew from her, I noticed, but scant direct response. I was struck thus with her reserve when I spoke of her daughter—my remarks produced so little of a maternal flutter. Her detachment, her air of having no fatuous illusions and not being blinded by prejudice, seemed to me at times to savour of affectation. Either she answered me with a vague and impatient sigh and changed the subject, or else she said before doing so: "Oh yes, yes, she's a very brilliant creature. She ought ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... woman as his shrinking victim—in brief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... present German Government is compounding for 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 ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... For an elderly 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
... 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 ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... an effect far beyond its proportionate numbers; for, to quote again Napoleon's phrase, "War is a business of positions." This idea is by no means new, even to unprofessional men; on the contrary, it is so old that it is deplorable to see such fatuous arguments as the necessity of equalling Great Britain's navy adduced against any scheme of external policy. The annexation of Hawaii, to recur to that, may be bad policy for many reasons, of which I am no good judge; but, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... indeed to come! He further states his belief that the reason why no entrenchments were 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 destined to ...
— 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
... this knowledge, as he moved among them in the dimness and the silence, brushing the sleeve of one, the skirt of another, looking into the curiously expressive eyes of all. But presently his wondering recognition of the world's fatuous and frantic gullibility ceased. For at the end of an alley of murderers he stood before a woman. She was young, pretty and distinguished in appearance. Her features were small and delicate. Her brow was noble. Her painted mouth was tender and saintly; and, though ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... loses his balance, and sits down involuntarily. His burdens are scattered over the hillside. Cornelius and Father Dempsey turn furiously on him, leaving Broadbent beaming at the stone and the tower with fatuous interest. ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 to the strong arm that could be trusted to provide her with ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... 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 ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... ideal 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 ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... fork, even to the last pocket handkerchief belonging to the Emperor and marked with his initials. Oh! it was monstrous! hellish! devilish! It makes my blood boil whenever I think of it . . . whenever I think of those fatuous, treacherous Bourbons gloating over those treasures at the Tuileries, while our Empress went her way as effectually despoiled as if she had been waylaid by so many brigands ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... not indifferent to all feelings; he is only indifferent to everybody else's feelings. At the thought of his own virtues he is always ready to burst into tears. His smiles, however, are even more frequent and more fatuous than his tears; and they are all leers like that which Mr. Raemaekers has drawn on the face of the expansive Prussian officer in the arm-chair. Compared with such an exhibition, there is something relatively virile about the tiger cruelty which has occasionally defaced the record of the Spaniard ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... everybody, and shaming all other families—especially those into which she and her sisters had married—by odious comparisons with the Dodsons. All this we grant is very cleverly done. The grim Mrs. Glegg and the fatuous Mrs. Tulliver and Mrs. Pullet talk admirably in their respective kinds; and we can quite believe that there are people who are not unfairly represented by the Dodsons—with, the narrow limitation of their thoughts to their own little circle—the extravagantly high opinion of their own vulgar ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... likely to have neglected the Hrad[vs]any, which stronghold was furnished with a permanent garrison of ten knights and three hundred men-at-arms. The north side of the castle has preserved the mediaeval appearance which has been improved away on the other sides, chiefly by fatuous Habsburger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the north side overhanging the deep-cut Stags' Moat shows you the formidable nature of this fortress with its stout towers rising up over the tops of tall trees that struggle up out of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... alcoholic drinks in any form. If one never begins with alcohol he can find 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
... our work with fatuous self-complacency, and no suspicion of the trouble in store for us, or the storm that was to presently hurtle around our devoted heads. I winnowed the poems, and he exploited a preliminary announcement to an eager and waiting press, and we moved together ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... at the moment when the war broke out it had led us to the verge of national disaster. The war has brought us into closer touch with realities than we had been for many a long year before, and it has taught us how ruinous it is in fatuous complacency to "wait and see" whither disorder, disloyalty, and disobedience will conduct us. If, however, there are still in our midst ministers who tremble before rebellion, and do not know how to act in the presence of organized passive resistance, let me commend to them the worthy example ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... to take up, after a drop, a different 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
... 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. The "Matthew" is without ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... witnessing to-day all over Europe (including the British Islands), the break-up of old institutions, the generally materialistic outlook on life, the coming to the surface of huge masses of diseased and fatuous populations, the scum and dregs created by the past order, all point to the End of a Dispensation. Protestantism and Commercialism, in the two fields of religion and daily life have, as I have indicated before, been occupied in concentrating the mind of each man solely on his ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... a few words. He heard the sound of a sharp breath indrawn through closed teeth. The Northman with his hand on the table stood absolutely motionless and dumb. He stood as if thunderstruck. Then he produced a fatuous smile. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... made 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 closer, we notice that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the most dangerous sea in the world, he threw this obvious precaution to the wind. Hamilton, to whom we are indebted for this information (for it did not transpire at the court martial) says that "the great length of the voyage would not permit it." How fatuous a proceeding it was in unsurveyed and unknown waters may be judged from the fact that in coral seas that have been carefully surveyed all ships of war are now compelled to keep the lead going whenever they move in coral waters. On August ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... 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. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... brutish morals. It is time that this age of ours, so rich in theoretic if impracticable humanitarianisms, forebore to flatter the spirits which work against it in its efforts toward higher and wiser achievement. The anarchists hanged in Chicago were men of mistaken purpose and fatuous belief. But at least they were conceivably sincere, however dangerous to peace and order. These czars and tycoons of finance, on the other hand, are scoffers at the integrity of the commonweal, and have for their Lares and Penates hideous little gods carved by their ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... jocose draughtsman, and of course what I mean is that his comic force is serious—a very different thin from the absence of comedy. This essential sign of the caricaturist may surely be anything it will so long as it is there. Daumier's figures are almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened, mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost tragic the look of the particular pretension, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... one to love, to talk with. Why had she discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them? Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... unpatriotic assertion that neither in Great Britain nor in 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 interviewer this way of action ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... three points just 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 to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... There are 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 their lives. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... collars, mother," Sybil objected. "It was his neck. He was always called 'the Giraffe.' He had no head and all neck—the most fatuous person, too. I ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... transfix it. It is humiliating, but not pathetic, not even when yearning hearts are trying to pretend that their first-born vibrates to them through a stranger's and a hireling's mind. It is not even grotesque, but it is gross, and flat, and stale; its messages are fatuous, its machinery the rickety heirlooms of old humbugs of Greece and Alexandria. No thrill, no terror, no true awe, nothing but "goose-flesh" and disgust, creep from the medium's presence. Pegasus need not be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... 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
... without superfluous aid, without interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but, believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a preposterous 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, and considering ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... would seem to be unbosoming himself of his 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? She could not ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... 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
... quick to distinguish between savors of meats, so is a wise man in discerning things and causes." Wherefore it is manifest that folly is opposed to wisdom as its contrary, while fatuity is opposed to it as a pure negation: since the fatuous man lacks the sense of judgment, while the fool has the sense, though dulled, whereas the wise man has the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... in ordinary life, the woman is 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. ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... outcry against him took its course: and the public, as usual, gulped down the most fatuous and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... do they set fire to training ships? Why do they break out of reformatory institutions? Bawling is not necessarily happiness. Yet fatuous fools are content if only they can hear a good uproar ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... 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 all ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... voice of a siren, and the red lips of Hebe—will be invited to reign as l'ambassadrice! If I am not as mad with jealous despair as Othello, attribute my escape either to a sublime faith in your adorable constancy and incorruptibility, or to my own colossal vanity, fatuous beyond absolution." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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 ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... literature, for national ideals. And one deals with millions, not petty thousands. This English community, with its squabbles about rituals, its four Chief Rabbis all in love with one another, its stupid Sephardim, its narrow-minded Reformers, its fatuous self-importance, its invincible ignorance, is but an ant-hill, a negligible quantity in the future of the faith. Westward the course of Judaism as of empire takes its way—from the Euphrates and Tigris it emigrated to Cordova and Toledo, and the year that saw ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... another M.P. who defended the same Bill as "an honest attempt" to deal with a great evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come of it. But with this fatuous notion that one can deliberately establish the Inquisition or the Terror, and then faintly trust the larger hope, I shall have to deal more seriously in a subsequent chapter. It is enough to say here that the best thing the honest Endeavourer could do would be to make an honest ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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
... gallantry's very grateful servant," she whispered, having much ado to keep from laughing in his face. The fatuous ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... treacherous yet brave power—the South. They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the extreme, and could not be toyed with as with a doll-baby. So the statesmen proceeded to manufacture the "Reconstruction policy"—a policy more fatuous, more replete with fatal concessions and far more fatal omissions than any ever before adopted for the acceptance and governance of a rebellious people on the one hand and a newly made, supremely helpless people on the other. It is not easy to regard with equanimity ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... her question with the lubricant of a few more words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... satire, so fatuous, so plain, so false, together with the would-be jaunty manner of the speaker, who, however, failed repeatedly in his utterances from sheer physical exhaustion, was excessively painful to Stanbury. What can one do at any time with a madman? "I mentioned my marriage," said he, "to ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... he 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
... time display its true character and significance. Liberals who 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 when all "claptrap" was laid aside, the "real stuff" of Liberalism—its ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... "crambe 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, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... like that. For every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind. I see the truth of it now. When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous. With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed folds of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence presented right there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it, your average fattish man nevertheless refuses ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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
... unstrapped 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
... 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 accompany ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... asked him if she knew, then, he was to speak to me of coming, and whether I might allude to him, whether it was not too delicate. I shall never forget his answer to this, nor the tone in which he made it, blushing a little, and looking away. "Allude to me? Rather!" It was not the most fatuous speech I had ever heard; it had the effect of being the most modest; and it gave me an odd idea, and especially a new one, of the condition in which, at any time, one might be destined to find Lady Vandeleur. If she, too, were engaged in a struggle with her conscience (in this light they ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... what this remark meant, and caring less, answered with a cold stare, though inwardly he cursed the man for his fatuous impertinence. That done, he relapsed dully into his own thoughts, which were all of the house he had scurried from, terrified by Peter's cry, half ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... rather a fatuous boy, with round, innocent eyes, easily opening at tales of marvel, and a temptation to ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... familia family. famoso famous. fandango fandango (Spanish dance). fanega acre, bushel. fantasma m. phantasm, vision. farmaceutico druggist. fatiga fatigue. fatigar to fatigue. fatuo fatuous, vain, false; fuego —— ignis fatuus, will o' the wisp. faz f. face. fe f. faith, certificate; a —— mia upon my honor; a —— que in truth. febrero February. fecundo fruitful, fertile. fecha date. fechoria action, misdeed. fehacientes (faith-inspiring) conclusive. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... 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
... "What fatuous, little cylindrical creatures we humans are! With our exact and placid surfaces that we call beauty. And these grave and noble houses ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... glistened with the same fatuous determination he had shown at first. There was no doubt he would do as ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... first on top of the overturned boat, and dragged me up after him. Together we hauled up Brown, who could not swim but was bombastically furious and unafraid; and the three of us pulled out the porters and the fatuous boat's owner. The pole was floating near by, and I swam down-stream and fetched it. When they had dragged me back on to the wreck the moon came out, and we saw the far bank hazily ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... perilously upon the infatuated, if not fatuous, he repeated her name aloud; and she looked at him out of soft grey eyes that seemed at ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago there were no letters for either of the two young men. As every other person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and prompted Hirst to ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... have been undertaken by Mrs. Shelley; they are a unique and touching monument of that intimate co-operation which at times, especially in the early years in Italy, could make the union of 'the May' and 'the Elf' almost unreservedly delightful. It would undoubtedly be fatuous exaggeration to ascribe a very high place in literature to these little Ovidian fancies of Mrs. Shelley. The scenes, after all, are little better than adaptations—fairly close adaptations—of ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... danger of being betrayed by a speech like this into saying something too hideously fatuous, over the memory of which he would grow hot with shame in the night-watches, so he contented himself with an indulgent smile, perhaps, in default of some impossible combination of wit and ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... sharply midway at the threshold of the 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
... Pyreneans. Lubbock was there, and told me that my precious speculation was one of Von Baer's, and that the Finns are supposed to have made the Kjokken moddings. I read Max Muller a year ago—and quite agree, first part is excellent; last, on origin of language, fatuous and feeble as ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... 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 directly to increase ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... that the reason why no entrenchments were 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 ...
— 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
... 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 ball of peculiarity, and toe his way up the spiral of fame, while ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... more 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 ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... I 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 ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... and the ears of this metropolis, that fell in love, at first sight, with 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 ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... This fatuous note was found on a paper which the notary's clerks had thought of no importance in the inventory of the estate of M. Ferdinand de Bourgarel, who was mourned of late by politics, arts and amours, and in whom is ended the great Provencal ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... once indicates to the practised clairvoyant that it is an expression of jealousy, and its curious shape shows the eagerness with which the man is watching its object. The remarkable resemblance to the snake with raised head aptly symbolises the extraordinarily fatuous attitude of the jealous person, keenly alert to discover signs of that which he least of all wishes to see. The moment that he does see it, or imagines that he sees it, the form will change into the far commoner one shown in Fig. 26, where the jealousy is already mingled ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... destiny and the 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 ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... however, is true to nature and fact: it would be a mistake to attribute to a miser a high appreciation of the dignity of man. Covetousness, in its more advanced stages, eats the pith out of the understanding, and leaves its victim almost fatuous. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... enjoying yourself,' said Peter at last—Peter who never made fatuous conversational remarks of this sort. The words, for no reason in themselves, fell oddly, and were followed by a silence which was disturbing and made for sudden self-consciousness wholly to be condemned, and to be banished, if possible, directly. Jane, who did not ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... heel. He was 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 that unless he exercised ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... strong hopes which in his presence had been almost convictions were gradually giving way to a new despair. Then he would abuse the Secretary of State, say hard things of the Queen, express his scorn as to the fatuous absurdities of the English law, and would make her understand by his anger that he ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... curled back, though she said nothing. She wondered if he had always been quite so fatuous as this, quite so sublimely unhumorous. If he had, what under heaven had she been about? That she could have believed this smug cockscomb to have loved her—to have been capable of anything but hunger and thirst for her—incredible! It made her out precisely as fatuous as he. And yet ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... 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
... once described it as a place of "little antiquity." It has less history. Its civil annals are short and simple. It gave a loyal welcome to Henry VII. on his return from stamping out Perkin Warbeck's fatuous rebellion; and Monmouth's troops, as an interlude in their inglorious campaign, found uproarious diversion by stabling their horses in the canons' stalls, and holding a wild carousal in the sanctuary. The ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... 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 realm of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... on the sternly-compressed lips and dark, beetling brows of Gaut Gurley, ever sinister, was doubly so now; that on the face of Mark Elwood, whose vacillations of thought and feeling, through life, had exempted his features from any stamp betokening fixed peculiarity of character, was one of fatuous security; and that resting on the intellectual and guileless face of Claud Elwood was one ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... 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 ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... proper methods[159]. So far as these systems express the idea that the human mind can grasp the universe by knowledge, they offer an example of the bold sweep of the Hindu intellect, but the methods prescribed are often fatuous. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Wild Girl of the Sierras, and I retired from the field a long time. But now this same Eggers is starting, in Denver, an Art Museum from its very foundations, but on the same constructive scale. So this enterprise, in my fond and fatuous fancy, is associated with the sweet Mae Marsh as The Wild Girl of the Sierras—one of the loveliest bits of poetry ever put into screen ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... mystic crop of long black curls, which waved about like the locks of a sibyl when she made a lunge at an innocent looking young man who sat No. 1—and whom, with the other patients, I shall designate thus numerically. He seemed to like it immensely, and smiled a fatuous smile as those taper fingers lighted on his head, while the other hand rested on the frontal portion of his face, as though Miss Chandos were going to pull his nose. He was off in a moment, and sat facing the audience in his magnetic trance, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... ambassador, de Guerchy, and with the minister, de Praslin; and would not have been promoted at all, had it been known to the minister that he was in correspondence with, and was taking orders from, the disgraced Comte de Broglie. But, by the fatuous system of the King, d'Eon, in fact, was doing nothing else. De Broglie, exiled from Court, was d'Eon's real master, he did not serve de Guerchy and de Praslin, and Madame de Pompadour, who was not in the secret of her ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the room, carefully not seeing the fatuous glances Pietro was throwing her way, and I swung in behind. She nodded back at me, but headed straight for Lomax, with an odd look on her face. When she reached him, her ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... hour he 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 recommending it. He began thinking, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and small moustache very dark; the brown eyes inexpressive 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 ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... can be scoffed at as an alarmist who ventures to fear that a censorship of the drama will, in practice, be foolish. At the thought of such frivolous and fatuous blue-pencillings of his next drama (which is to be his master-piece, by the way) our playwright becomes profoundly depressed and every time he goes out to dinner or finds himself with a small, cornered audience at the club, he winds up the talk ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... we may find the way to grace. The 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, ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... spent in the fairy land of imagination; many a one he dreamed away in love castles built of fancied rambles in enchanted woods, of sweet talks in which he always said and did the right thing; destined alas! never to pass from mind to speech, for if ever tongue essayed the telling it faltered some fatuous abortion as little like love's dream as Caliban resembled Ariel. Fresh from the brave world of day-dreams, still smiling happily from some whimsical conceit as well as with anticipation of Aileen's gladness ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... 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
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