"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... progress, which members will have an opportunity of inspecting, was let to Mr. Evans, of Birmingham, in March last, for about L18,000. It consists of a stone and concrete weir, 500 feet in length, with a lock of 7 feet 6 inches lift and large flood basins, retaining and towing path walls, including a sunk weir parallel with the Midland Railway viaduct. This contract is to be completed by March ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... the same time practical and positive, inasmuch as it by no means faded away into the dim twilight of general equity or even into the pure nothingness of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules, and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received, a legal embodiment in the urban edict. This code moreover corresponded in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished the more convenient forms required ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... for his pack of furs. He has little idea of what we mean when we tell him he has five hundred skins' worth of fur, so we count out five hundred of these made beaver—he can see them, can feel them—the value of his catch is immediately reduced to something concrete—something he can understand—then we take away the amount of his debt, and if there are still some made beaver remaining, he knows he has something left over to spend for finery and frippery. Rarely does he use these extra skins for the purchase of food or necessary clothing—he contracts a new ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... flowing into the Rio Salado, and the latter into the Gila. Besides those streams, there are other smaller ones, not marked on the map. Mr. Bandelier found near the Canyon del Tule an improvement on the irrigating ditches, that was a lining of concrete; and in this section also was noticed the ruins of both pueblos and the small houses. Near Ft. Apache he found the ruins of the largest villages discovered in Arizona, but we have no details of it. The valley of the Rio Verde and Salado seems to ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... for a new departure!" the Italian poet cried to his people at Quarto when they were still hesitating between the paths of a prudent neutrality and intervention in the world decision. Probably in the poet's thought there was more of concrete ambition for "national aspirations" than of spiritual rebirth. But for the French nation it is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any meaning. No material enlargement of France has ever been seriously contemplated. ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... theoretical to a clear recognition and frank statement of their true position. To know and understand Socialism as it is, we must lay aside both the claims of Socialists and the attacks of their opponents and confine ourselves to the concrete activities of Socialist organizations, the grounds on which their decisions have been reached, and the reasons by which they are ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... "prave 'orts" at the National Liberal Club the mildness of his criticism upon the Government's foreign policy sadly disappointed his more ardent supporters. His only concrete suggestion was that we should surrender our mandate for Mesopotamia and retire to the coast, and this did not meet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... village grew larger, details became plainer, as the helicopter came slanting down and began spiraling around it. It was a fairly big place, some forty or fifty acres in a rough parallelogram, surrounded by a wall of varicolored stone and brick and concrete rubble from old ruins, topped with a palisade of pointed poles. There was a small jetty projecting out into the river, to which six or eight boats of different sorts were tied; a gate opened onto this from the wall. Inside ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... can of the advantages of living in a civilized state. Moreover, liberty is not a metaphysical or sentimental thing at all. It is positive, practical, and actual. It is produced and maintained by law and institutions, and is, therefore, concrete and historical. Sometimes we speak distinctively of civil liberty; but if there be any liberty other than civil liberty—that is, liberty under law—it is a mere fiction of the schoolmen, which they ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... everywhere in a process of growth, manifests itself in its early stages in study and self-cultivation; it assumes a more concrete form, in its later stages, of some communal or social activity; and if that development keeps on uninterruptedly it finally consummates in Zionism. This development, it must be admitted, is not a spontaneous and self-directive movement. In no small measure, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... benefit of the possible belief; but depend upon it that in truth she gives the lie to her conscience by maintaining such a transparent fallacy. Women's brains are not formed for assisting at any profound science: they lack the power to see things except in the concrete. She'll blab your most secret plans and theories to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Church. But do not let us suppose that that explanation gets to the bottom of the meaning of the words. It may stand as a partial answer, but only as partial. The evil tendency which attends all externalising of truth in the concrete form of institutions works in full force on the Church, and ever tempts us to substitute outward connection with the institution for real possession of the truth of which the institution is the outgrowth. Therefore I urge upon you very emphatically—and all the more earnestly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thus that concrete individual life is extinguished, in order that the abstract whole may continue its miserable life, and the state remains forever a stranger to its citizens, because feeling does not discover it anywhere. The governing authorities find themselves compelled ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Comte calls abstract or general Science, which has for its object the discovery of the laws which regulate Phenomena in all conceivable cases within their domain, and excluding the sphere of what he denominates concrete, particular, or descriptive Science, whose function it is to apply these laws to the history of existing beings. This throws such Natural Sciences as Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Geology, etc., out of his range. He also excludes the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... previous volume. Abler work has been done by abler boys in various schools at various times. They are interesting as the combined effort of a group rather than as the work of individuals. We reproduce them as the only concrete evidence available of the character of ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... that a young man who gets this book into his hands may, in after life, date his success from reading it. It is sound, wholesome, stimulating. The treatment is concrete. It abounds in specific advice ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... are further reasons; for the poets of England are greater than its moral philosophers; and it is of the nature of the poetic art that, while eschewing system, it presents the strife between right and wrong in concrete character, and therefore with a fulness and truth impossible to ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... advance in our conception of energy is strictly in accord with the Rules of Philosophy. First, it is simple in conception. When we say that a body possesses energy, whether that energy be potential energy or kinetic energy, it does not convey to the mind some definite concrete fact, as does the statement that a body possesses motion. Every one, whether familiar with scientific teaching or not, understands and is familiar with the word Motion, as it is a common phenomenon of everyday life and experience. As Energy ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... great concrete obstacle clear across the path of the river. It is many feet high, and many, many feet long. The river cannot go on south. Watch him. He rises higher than the obstacle and sweeps over it ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... was no idle one. Not only had the year been a red-letter one but it was destined to prove even more conspicuously memorable. With the spring the plans for the new village went rapidly forward and soon pretty little concrete houses with roofs of scarlet and trimmings of green dotted the slopes on the opposite side of the river. The laying out and building of this community became Grandfather Fernald's recreation and delight. Morning, noon, and evening he could be seen either perusing ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So Professor Aliotta urges with ...
— Progress and History • Various
... imperfect human knowledge, in the admittance of humanly proved fact, there is no reason why, from the emotional and imaginative side of his existence, he should not rigidly subscribe to dogma or personal conviction, whether the abstract idea of virtue, the concrete idea of love for some cherished human being, or the yearning for some supernatural state of sinlessness be concerned. A distinguished financier, for instance, may regale his imagination with socialistic dreams of a perfect Utopia; but, when the weekly household bills ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... words to him. The one thing that always remains, the one sure instinct that nature has implanted in us, is the instinct of self-interest. If you had lived as long as I have, you would know that there is but one concrete reality invariable enough to be worth caring about, and that is—GOLD. Gold represents every form of human power. I have traveled. I found out that there were either hills or plains everywhere: the plains are ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... said, "Oog," with, some fervor as the girl collided with his chest and rebounded like a handball striking a wall. Something was happening to her, but Malone had no time to spare to notice just what. He was falling through space, touching a concrete step once in a while, but not long enough to make any real acquaintance with it. It seemed to take him a long time to touch bottom, and when he had, he wondered if touch ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... turn scarlet with anger and all but draw blood from a bitten lip? She knew perfectly well that this gutter Don Juan's depravity could boast as many victims as his enforced prison life had left possible to him. But no particular one had ever become concrete to her, and jealousy of a multitude, no one better off than herself, had never rankled. Jealousy of Heaven-knows-who is a wishy-washy passion. Supply a definite object, and it may become vitriolic. Polly Daverill, whoever she was, was definite, and might be the wife the convict had acknowledged—or ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Curacoa—"boldly say a wilderness of gunroom"—and in the midst of this sat Mrs. Strong throned on the sofa and reading aloud Gleams of Memory. They had just come the length of your immortal definition of boyhood in the concrete, and I had the pleasure to see the whole party dissolve under its influence with inextinguishable laughter. I thought this was not half bad for arthritic gout! Depend upon it, sir, when I go into the arthritic gout business, I shall be done ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the field inviting, and their representatives, individual and associated, are busy in preparing to till it. The enthusiasm of the leading religious societies took the concrete shape of statuary. Hence the Catholic Fountain, heretofore noticed; the Hebrew statue to Religious Liberty, as established in a land that never had a Ghetto or a Judenstrasse; the Presbyterian figure of Witherspoon; an Episcopalian of Bishop White; and others under way or proposed. The temperance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... went on, "that some cannot live without it, but many cannot. The unimaginative need concrete images. There must be some channel for their aspirations to flow through—- Ah! ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... not scatter his interests indiscriminately but concentrated his efforts in the fields where he was most competent: social problems and the relation of the Church to the most concrete activities of human life. All these fitted into his ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... confession. So Garrison was honest! Somehow, she had always believed he was. His eyes, the windows of his soul, were not fouled. She had read weakness there, but never dishonesty. Yes, somehow she had always believed him honest. But he was married. That was different. The concrete, not the abstract, was paramount. All else was swamped by the fact that he was married. She could not believe that he had forgotten his marriage with his true identity. She could not believe that. Her heart was against her. Love to ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... in a room may obtain room and board in boarding houses in Manila at a rate as low as $35 per month each. In the Young Men's Christian Association building, a large reenforced concrete structure with reading room, gymnasium, and a good restaurant, the charge for two in a room is $10.25 each. Board costs $27.50, a total of $37.75. The expenses for clothing in Manila are less than in the United States, as white clothing is worn the ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... during this intercourse, of amorous significance. Nor did they steer the course so dear to modern intellectuals (and so dear too to the antiquated wanderers through the Land of Tenderness) which led them into analytical discussions of their respective sentimental states of being. They talked just concrete war, politics and travel. On their tramps they scarcely talked at all. They kept in step which maintained the rhythm of their responsive souls. She would lay an arresting touch on his arm at the instant in which he pointed his stick at some effect of beauty; and ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... have for active business men, bent on stemming a tide of disaster, spent much time in generalities and little on any concrete suggestion." ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... had said "No" at once—and that although he knew that he would have been very surprised and disappointed had she done so. On the whole he thought that after a period of maidenly hesitation she would say "Yes"; and, having inherited from an acquisitive father a positive, concrete kind of mind, as he trudged along he began ruminating over the question of Bubbles' marriage settlements. On one thing he was determined. Nothing should induce him so to arrange matters that in the event ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... and afterwards sang some French chansons. Both playing and singing were perfect of their kind. Rorie did not understand Chopin, and thought there was a good deal of unnecessary hopping about the piano in that sort of thing—nothing concrete, or that came to a focus; a succession of airy meanderings, a fairy dance in the treble, a goblin hunt in the bass. But the French chansons, the dainty little melodies with words of infantile innocence, all about leaves and buds, ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... peculiar method of concrete marking, Satan continued: "The following is the process of development from the phrase to the word: ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... assert that the very guardians of the law may violate it so long as they do so judiciously and do not molest the Duffys. The trouble goes deeper than that. The truth is that we are up against that most delicate of situations, the concrete adjustment of a theoretical individual right to a practical necessity. The same difficulty has always existed and will always continue to exist whenever emergencies requiring prompt and decisive action arise or conditions obtain that must be handled ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... as the beginning of man's redemption. We have seen how in the carols, the cult of the presepio, and the religious drama, the Birth of the King of Glory in the stable at midwinter has presented itself in concrete form to the popular mind, calling up a host of human emotions, a crowd of quaint and beautiful fancies. Lastly we have noted the survival, in the most varied degrees of transformation, of things which are alien to Christianity and in some cases ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... trained, and are therefore in no wise to blame for exhibiting a certain degree of ferocity. The canine mind is wholly lacking in the power of deduction, its intelligence consisting rather of a highly developed instinctive faculty for retaining impressions which invariably express themselves in some concrete form such as hate, fear, joy, affection and like primitive emotions. Pat, for instance, has been taught to regard strangers as interlopers. He therefore resents the presence of all strangers, and has no mental faculty for distinguishing between strangers, as such, ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape, magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... past ages; and in demonstration of its value as applied to more recent times, even at the risk of being tedious, I will give some examples from my own professional experience. I do this because nothing adds more to the efficacy of truth than the translation of the abstract into the concrete. Withholding names, I will state the facts with ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... certainly the poorest tests of relative values where the work done belongs to periods of development. We cannot, however, see or know any man except through and in his work, and net results must usually be accepted as the only concrete foundation for judging of the quality of his genius. Such judgment will always be influenced, nevertheless, by considerations such as Rossetti mentions. Touching Chatterton's development, it were hardly rash to say that it appears incredible that the African ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... with the inevitable gasoline pump at the curb, and a dozen or so of weatherbeaten frame houses. That was all. It was a typical, dusty cross-roads hamlet of the vintage of thirty years before, utterly isolated and apart from the rushing life of the broad concrete highway ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... frequently told himself all this; told it to others, too. But, now, the younger set, en masse and in detail, had become a little bit cramponne—a trifle too all-pervading. And it was because his regard for them, in the abstract, had become centred in a single concrete example that he began to find the younger set a nuisance. But others, it seemed, were quite as mad about Eileen Erroll as he was; and there seemed to be small chance for him to possess himself of her, unless ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... beside the hurrying beck where it made edges and chattered white. He had not seen, he could not imagine her face: angelic dashed with demon beauty, was his idea of the woman, and there is little of a portrait in that; but he was of a world where the elemental is more individual than the concrete, and unconceived of sight she was a recognised presence for the green-island brain of a youth whose manner of hating was to conjure her spirit from the air and let fly his own in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... foundations for those famous Exercitia, which became his instrument for rapidly passing neophytes through spiritual training similar to his own. It was here that he first distinguished two kinds of visions, infernal and celestial. Here also he grew familiar with the uses of concrete imagination;, and understood how the faculty of sensuous realization might be made a powerful engine for presenting the past of sacred history or the dogmas of orthodox theology under shapes of fancy to the mind. Finally, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the German big guns as if they were some happy chance. But the Germans were drilling and preparing while we were making speeches at Hyde Park Corner. Everything had been thought out by them. People talk of the difficulty they must have had in preparing concrete floors for their guns. Not a bit of it. There were innocent dwelling-houses, built long ago, with floors in just the right position and of just the right stuff, and when they were wanted the top stories were blown off and the concrete gun-floors were ready. There were local exhibitions, too, ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... regard for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully. Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a matter of geography; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in service. She has acted as a sort of handmaiden to literature, her mission being to make clear to the casual and the unlettered what the lettered had already understood and enjoyed in a more subtle and more erudite form. But to pass from the abstract to the concrete, and, so far as regards subject, to make my meaning quite clear to every one, I cannot do better than to ask my readers to recall Mr. Luke Fildes' picture of "The Doctor". No better example could be selected of a picture in which the subject is the supreme ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... but a pretty girl who looks pretty outdoors on a dazzling hot summer morning is prettier then than ever. Cora knew it; of course she knew it; she knew exactly how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as a picture—the ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... manager and half a dozen hands. The partners themselves slept in a tent. There was also a cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well diggers who were working on the new buildings. They drove out in Fords from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn't go home till after supper. The wagon shed of the old horse barn served as a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... enjoyment by looking forward to the new life that he was going to begin and in which his father, his art, and Turner Ravis were to be the chief influences. The thought of this prospect did give him pleasure, but he had for so long a time fed his mind upon the more tangible and concrete enjoyments of the hour and minute that it demanded them ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... nothing happened. Then a ten-foot-square section of the wall receded two feet and slid noiselessly to one side. The section which had slid inward had been built of three-inch steel, masked by a thin covering of boards; the wall around it was two-foot concrete, similarly camouflaged. He ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... large extent, the reservoir of the Cross was artificial. It had been constructed by throwing a deep stone and concrete dam across a narrow canyon through which there percolated, in summer, a small stream. Its cubic capacity was such, however, that when this reservoir was filled by spring freshets it contained water enough to run the full season round if sparingly used; and it was on this alone that ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... at this point, when his resentment was at its height, that Adair, the concrete representative of everything ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... Bible class and through-the-week activity? The missionary lesson must not be just fact, but related fact. The through-the-week meeting that contemplates the deepening of interest in other lands must be recreational and social. The contacts must be real, vital, and individual—expressed in the concrete interests of the now. This is the principle. The method must be the work of the lesson writer and the missionary expert, and, until this is achieved, missions must still be but two uninteresting facts for the teen age ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... come to a stop; with a sudden flight from the abstract to the concrete, she had begun a fresh argument on a ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the greatest importance that everything should be ready for the ova long before they are expected, as hurry and new apparatus are likely to cause failure. Any concrete and varnished or enamelled woodwork should be exposed to the action of a current of water for at least five or six weeks before they ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... personages, as Lechery, Luxury, and Curiosity, introduced along with concrete particular characters of Scripture. This is carried still further in another play of a later date, called the Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalen, where we have divers personifications of abstract ideas, such as Law, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... tow-headed youth glowering at him out of pinkish albino eyes. The way lay in part along the creek-bed, where wagons had ground the disintegrating rock into deep ruts as smooth as walls of concrete. Then, it traversed a country of palisading cliffs and immensity of forest, park-like and splendid. Strangely picturesque suspension bridges with rough stairways at their ends spanned waters too deep for fording. Frame houses showed along the banks of ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... few cases only. Nothing will make me believe that an acre or so of concrete enclosure will make up to a wolf or a tiger-cat for the range of night prowling that would belong to it in a wild state. Think of the dictionary of sound and scent and recollection that unfolds before a real ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the skipper murmured. "I feel like I've been fed into a concrete mixer. The only injury I can account for is my left shoulder, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... experience to overhear the teacher inquiring of the superintendent how she should proceed in order to inculcate in her pupils a sense of responsibility. We should be acutely alert to catch every word of the superintendent's reply. If he were dealing with such a concrete problem as Milo and the calf, his response would probably be satisfactory; but when such an abstract quality as responsibility is presented to him his reply might be vague and unsatisfactory. His thinking may have ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... in popular language, what the true name of that height of learning is: he could not well name without circumlocution, that height which a scientific abstraction makes,—an abstraction that attains simplicity without destroying the concrete reality, an abstraction that attains as its result only a higher history,—a new and more intelligible reading of it,—a solution of it—that which is fixed and constant and accounts for it,—an abstraction whose apex ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... tons of fallen debris on the floor upstairs. That strengthens it. It is shored up from inside with rafters. This makes the roof shell-proof, except for big shells, and the enemy always use big shells. The cellar floors are concrete. ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... disguise of the mess, he saw the clue. A foot-mark! No less. A crimson foot-mark on the grey concrete! ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... in common with his brother artists, he ultimately compassed. But it would be folly not to recognise the essential germs of a right aspiration which grew out of that interchange of feeling and opinion which, in its concrete shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti is acknowledged to have taken the most prominent part in the movement, supplying, it is alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... imagination and an almost unequalled power of illustration. The thought is always concrete, and he is never satisfied with the vague ideas and abstract conceptions which so easily moved his contemporaries. No speeches, either in English or in German, preserve so much of their freshness. He is almost the only Parliamentary orator whose speeches ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... conventional religion, Saxon's nature was deeply religious. Her thoughts of God were vague and nebulous, and there she was frankly puzzled. She could not vision God. Here, in the daguerreotype, was the concrete; much she had grasped from it, and always there seemed an infinite more to grasp. She did not go to church. This was her high altar and holy of holies. She came to it in trouble, in loneliness, for ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... have endeavoured to present, with something of the concrete character of a picture, Dionysus, the old Greek god, as we may discern him through a multitude of stray hints in art and poetry and religious custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... his characters, we may not be informed whence they came or whither they move; there is nothing concrete or circumstantial about them; their life is intense and consistent, but it is wholly in a spiritual character. They are mysterious with the mystery of the movements ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... explain to him what a college was before he would quit his job. He thought it was something good to eat at first, I believe. Ole was a timid young Norwegian giant, with a rick of white hair and a reenforced concrete physique. He escaped from his clothes in all directions, and was so green and bashful that you would have thought we were cannibals from the way he shied at us—though, as that was the year the bright hat-ribbons came in, I can't blame him. He wasn't like anything ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... warmed up by exercise is a very common source of muscular rheumatism and is especially to be avoided. Young hogs and sows that are thin are very prone to rheumatism when given wet, draughty sleeping quarters. Houses having dirt or loose board floors are very often draughty. Concrete floors when wet and not properly bedded with straw are objectionable. Although we do not fully understand the causative factors, we can take advantage of the knowledge we have gained from practical experience, and avoid keeping animals under conditions that are favorable for the production of the ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... straightway becomes the rage; it seems epidemical; it comes out simultaneously as a piece of political economy, a cookery-book, a tragedy, a farce, a novel, a religious experience, an abstract ism, or a concrete ology; till the poor worn-out, dissipated shadow of a thought looks so feeble, thin, fashionably affected and fashionably infected, that its honest, bluff old father, for very shame, disowns it. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and patched with rectangular fields of green, brown, and yellow; upon the bottoms there are frequent truck farms; now and then are stone quarries upon the banks, with capacious barges moored in front; and upon one or two rocky ledges were stone-crushers, getting out material for concrete pavements. When we ask the bargemen, in passing, whither their loads are destined, the invariable reply is, "The city"—meaning Cincinnati, still ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... diverted all their interest from speculation about the universe, life, and mankind, to the material interests of their new country. Germany became the preoccupation of all Germans. From abstractions they turned with a new intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete. Entering thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other nations. In ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... should—make sacrifices for his country during war. But, although he carried away with him the conviction that his offer would ultimately be accepted, there was nothing actually accomplished. He sent Hutchinson back, and waited for a day or two, convinced that his very sincerity must bring a concrete result, and soon. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Lord is greater than all gods."[27] But this is not the quasi-monotheism of the Hindu, to whom the other gods were real and potent factors, individually distinct from the one supreme god, who represents the All-god, but is at once abstract and concrete. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... jumped sideways and upwards with a wiggling movement, turning two somersaults, and stopped beating. The hideous truth, working its way slowly through the concrete, had at last penetrated to his brain. He was not only in somebody else's room, and a woman's at that. He was in the room belonging to Miss ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... respect to the sincerity of this conviction the more because I wish to lay before you some grounds for questioning its ultimate validity. It is no problem of abstract politics or ethics with which I here confront your minds, but one of concrete and immediate urgency. Distinctively economic in its substance, it brings right into the daylight the hitherto obscure issue of the duty of nations as members of an actual or potential society of nations. As a result of the destruction of war a large ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... heard her slippers shuffling over the concrete. She arrived in a brilliant blue nylon robe, with white fluffy slippers and traces of a lighter blue nightgown underneath. The hangar brightness brought a frown to her eyes, which she shielded with a hand cupped to her brow. A creature as entrancing as that, Grant decided, should now recite ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... performing other technical functions. The picture of this highly developed state, however, is not such as would tempt us to emulation. As a machine it works; as an ideal it lacks any presentation of the thing we call beauty. The apotheosis of intelligence in the concrete example leaves us unambitious in ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... successes, and the resounding triumph of his naughtiness there, by a reflex action, secured the vote of London. Posterity has fully sanctioned this particular "judicium Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui generis, and in the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete form in successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this small masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the Great Cham's Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity of the "Ossianite" ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... concrete and fitted to the intelligence of your audience."—I watched the Hon. Cy, and never said a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... take the moderate trouble of translating these words from the abstract into the concrete will need no further demonstration of the moral implications of this type of Monism. "There is no will"—not even the most brutalised or the most debauched—"that is not God's will." "Nothing can happen to any of God's children"—say, to the natives of the Congo or to a Jewish community during ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... "exercises his will"; but the fact is, that one motive weighs down the other, and causes the balance of the mind to lean to the weightier reason. There is no such thing as an exterior will outside the man's brain, to push one scale down with a finger. Will is abstract, not concrete. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... this habit of vivifying the inanimate is the more subtle artifice of transfiguring or magnifying concrete objects, so that they become symbolic without ceasing to be real. This blending of the actual and the figurative is seen in the description of the King ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... night, this one upon which the extraordinary incident about to be related took place. It was the kind of night that novelists use when they are handling a mystery that in the abstract would amount to nothing, but which in the concrete of a bit of wild, weird, and windy nocturnalism sends the reader into hysterics. It may be—I shall not attempt to deny it—that had it happened upon another kind of an evening—a soft, mild, balmy June evening, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... sure that she had not worn out her passion by dwelling on it. But that might easily be caused by the mere gene of the first two or three meetings. There is a shyness, a sort of coldness, in meeting again a person one has passionately loved. To see the dream in flesh and blood, the thought made concrete, once more brings poetry down to prose. Then the terms they met on now were changed. He was playing such a different part. Instead of the strong, determined man who had voluntarily left her, refusing to know her as a friend, and reproaching her bitterly for playing with him, as he called ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... the jury; but this was obviously equivalent to saying, and did in fact mean, that the railroad company had done all that it was bound to do in maintaining such a staircase as was proved by the plaintiff. A hundred other equally concrete instances will be ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... manner in which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing in the medieval civilization of the fifteenth century; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... honesty. The right to life is as clear as that two and two make four, and none dispute it. The right to liberty and to ownership of property fairly earned is just as clear to the enlightened mind as that 5 x 6 30; but the less enlightened may require to reflect about it, just as they may want concrete signs to show that five times six do really make thirty. As we ascend in numbers and in morals, the intuitive perceptions become less and less; and though the truths are there, and ought to be admitted as axiomatic, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... until quite the last few years, when the practice of purchase has admitted to it brewers, money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who can furnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund. A concrete example is often of value in the illustration of a general process, and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the reader as excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolution of the monasteries not ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... with boulders rammed in with clay. On this a wood fire was built, and the clay burned hard, resting on this around the edges a form of boards was placed, making a sort of bottomless box. The cement, mixed with sand and water from the creek, was made into a concrete which was poured into the form upon the baked clay and boulders. The plastic mass when it filled the boxlike structure to the top was smoothed off and allowed to dry. Forty-eight hours after it had hardened into stone and ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... of journalism in West Africa is that fair play is unknown to it. The negroes may thoroughly identify themselves with England, claim a share in her greatness, and display abundant lip-loyalty; yet there is the racial aversion to Englishmen in the concrete, and to this is added the natural jealousy of seeing strangers monopolise the best appointments. The Sa Leonite openly declares that he and his can rule the land much better and more economically than the sickly foreigner, who spends half ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... like that of all governments, is the good of mankind; and the possession of as much freedom by each State, as is consistent with the attainment of that end. But there is this difference: that the government thus set up over nations is ideal, and has no concrete representative of the sovereign power; whence the only way of settling any dispute finally is to fight it out. Thus the supra-national society is continually in danger of returning to the state of nature, in which contracts are void; and the possibility of this contingency justifies a government ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... One who has never tested the merit of walks with children cannot possibly appreciate the enjoyment and benefit that can accrue from them. It is not only the physical good that results, nor the inspiration which one may draw from nature, but the concrete advantages that come from the fellowship with the children are a new and a real experience—this is what counts. You will have opportunities of sewing seeds in their minds that will grow into a harvest that will astonish you. Children in the right mood—and they are in ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... of the compilation order, the play of the Good-natured Man began to assume concrete form; insomuch that Johnson, always the friend of this erratic Irishman, had promised to write a Prologue for it. It is with regard to this Prologue that Boswell tells a foolish and untrustworthy story about Goldsmith. Dr. Johnson had recently been honoured by an ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... MacDaniels asked for concrete evidence. He wanted to know where there was an orchard with 20-year-old grafted Chinese chestnut trees. They haven't been planted that long, but I would like to give him concrete evidence ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... easy of comprehension, is, to my mind, difficult of conception. Why, children in our homes and schools may be taught the truth, and grasp it in its concrete form, and that is the highest test of the simplicity ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... . . The author of Loyalty suffers one simple and amazing delusion. He imagines that in those pre-war politics Liberalism was on the side of Labour. On this point at least I can correct him from the most concrete experience. In the newspaper office where his hero lingered, wondering how much longer he could stand its Pacifism, I was lingering and wondering how much longer I could stand its complete and fundamental ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... not pretend that I had any lofty aims or ambitions, felt any regard for its dignity or fascination for the mysteries of its science when I selected it for my profession. My objects were practical—my ambition to get the largest financial return consonant with the least amount of work. My one concrete experience of the law had opened my eyes to its possibilities in a way that I had never dreamed of, and I resolved to lose no time in placing myself in a position to rescue others from harm on the same pecuniary basis ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... to read a character like Butler's "A Flatterer" to appreciate Gally's point. The Theophrastan method had been to describe a character operatively—that is, through the use of concrete dramatic incident illustrating the particular vice. The seventeenth-century character is too often merely a showcase for the writer's wit. One frequently finds a succession of ingenious metaphors, each redefining from a slightly different angle a type's master-passion, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the thing seemed done—vague and yet, somehow, concrete. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... as with an invisible hand, a sketch of the nocturnal funeral train, proved vain. Each one's fancy silently carried out the picture further; they saw the body itself on the stretcher; the bier was depicted with distinctness as if it were a concrete token of the mysterious deed; a carpenter even drew it in chalk in bold strokes on the wall of the court-house. A woman who suffered from insomnia stated that she was sitting at the window that night and in spite of the darkness, recognized Bancal as well as the soldier, Colard, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... usages and traditions, valuing the liberties, as they called them, which they had wrested from what had been superior force, with their own right hands, preferring facts to theories, and feeling competent to deal with tyrants in the concrete rather than to annihilate tyranny in the abstract by a bold and generalizing phraseology. Moreover the opponents of the Leicester party complained that the principal use to which this newly discovered "people" ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... editor of a trade journal. Yet the seeds sown within him during the previous winter were sprouting. An irresistible impulse urged him to continue the work of Buckle. History and philosophy were the ultimate ends tempting his mind, but first of all he was impelled to express himself in terms of concrete life, and the way had been shown him by Goethe. Moved by Goethe's example, he felt himself obliged to break through the stifling forms of classical drama. "No verse, no eloquence, no unity of place," was the resolution he formulated ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... simply a phenomenal manifestation. The two are correlative terms; so that his definition of the one must necessarily be the definition of the other, either as an identical or partial judgment. But let us take his definition entirely out of its abstract sense, and run it into the concrete. The able pathological anatomist of the London University college is a "living thing." He is, therefore, presumably a phenomenal manifestation. He is capable of growing, by "selection and interstitial appropriation," in reputation at least, if not in the direction of "an independent entity." ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... feeling, she, though going off in a huff, tells him that she had never meant him either to leave her at first or to accept her command not to return. All this, no doubt, is not unfeminine in the abstract; but the concrete telling of it required more interesting personages. Le Prix de Pigeons is a good-humoured absurdity about an English scientific society, which offers a prize of L2000 to anybody who can eat a pigeon every day for a month; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the wake of the main body, and filed out into the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... of the type of Messrs. Bryan, Jordan, and Ford, who in the name of peace preach doctrines that would entail not merely utter infamy, but utter disaster to their own country, never in practice venture to denounce concrete wrong by dangerous wrongdoers .... These professional pacifists, through President Wilson, have forced the country into a path of shame and dishonor during the past eighteen months. Thanks to President Wilson, the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Across the concrete between the two lighters, I could see the girl push out of the crowd around her and wave a hand to me. I tried to yell to her; but just then another lighter, loaded with freight, started to lift out at another nearby stand, with the roar of half a dozen Niagaras. The thin man in the striped ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... pour les dessous. There is in her a kind of inherited, conservative, clever, dainty capability; no matter where you go in France, or in what class—country or town—you find it. She cannot waste, she cannot spoil, she makes and shows—the best of everything. If I were asked for a concrete illustration of self-respect I should say—the Frenchwoman. It is a particular kind of self-respect, no doubt, very much limited to this world; and perhaps beginning to be a little frayed. We have some Frenchwomen at the hospital, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the Reality, the Noumenon behind the phenomenon; but the fact that from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality, has surrounded us with a concrete boundary wall through which we can only at times, with difficulty, get transient glimpses of that which is beyond. It is only in recent years that we have been able to realise that it is the Invisible which ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... which isolates him as a being like none other of his fellows, not even his parents, brothers, and sisters, is merely to beg the question. What is variation? The internal secretion theory of the process offers, for the first time, an explanation that is coherent and comprehensive, based upon concrete and detailed observations. It provides an adequate interpretation of the numberless hereditary gradations and transitions, blendings and mixtures. It suggests a control of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... And as it draws near to its end the thought of my book grows more and more dear to me. How I will get it published I know not; but I will. Then even if it doesn't sell, even if nobody reads it, I will be content. Out of this brief, perishable Me I will have made something concrete, something that will preserve my thought within its dusty covers long after I am ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... regards the phenomena the most general, the most abstract, the most remote from humanity; they influence all others, without being influenced by them. The phenomena considered by the last are, on the contrary, the most complicated, the most concrete, the most directly interesting to man; they depend more or less on all the preceding phenomena, without exercising on them any influence. Between these two extremes, the degrees of speciality, of complication and personality, of phenomena, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved. It is in this broader and deeper strategic application that Rapid Dominance perhaps most fundamentally ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... the north. Different people took the winter in different fashion, according to their temperaments. There were some who never could have faced a second winter with any degree of cheerfulness, but taking it all round, we did well enough, and when summer came again our concrete keenness and zeal had not one whit abated. That is especially true in the case of those who were chosen to make the great journey southward, even though it was obvious that certain members could only accompany their leader for a mere fraction of the ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... wish women would think a little less of Heaven in the abstract, and a little more of one another, in the concrete." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... pride as she regarded me inquiringly. Whatever obligation lay on me to till the ancestral acres, there was a higher duty which would absolve it. This she had pointed out. My plans at once took a concrete form, and though my first faltering assent might have savored of hypocrisy, I was soon sincere in my determination. And now the opposition crumbled and my parents found pride in a son whose heart at the age of ten was ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... and from the bed of the Lago della Colonna, once the celebrated Lake Regillus, to which the name of Lapis Tusculanus or Selce was given; and the Lapis Gabinus or Sperone, a compact volcanic concrete found in the neighbourhood of the ancient Gabii on the road to Tivoli, extensively used in the construction of the earliest monuments, particularly the Tabularium and the huge Arco de Pantani. Brick was also largely employed in the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... with time isn't supposed to be the game for a convalescent, but I'm inclined to think it's the dose you need, just the same. I expect, Jord, that the first time you pull on a pair of rubber boots and go to climbing around a big concrete dam somewhere your ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... be concrete they will make their creeds amusingly simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls on Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first pair? The Tree of Knowledge, of course. It appealed to the curiosity of their nature, and ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... characteristic of his mind, we must appeal to him through his senses. We must use the concrete; through it we must act upon his weak will and immature judgment. From his natural curiosity we must develop attention. His naturally strong perceptive powers must be made yet stronger; they must be led in proper directions and fixed upon appropriate objects. He must be led to appreciate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... that he had quite another gospel for the enlightened portion of the community. They could not see that among heathens used to apotheosis, man-worship, and plastic gods, ideas, to become effective, must put on concrete and tangible bodies. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various |
