"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minutes Grant 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 ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... other qualities. Barkilphedro was discreet, secret, concrete. He kept in everything and racked himself with his hate. Enormous baseness implies enormous vanity. He was liked by those whom he amused, and hated by all others; but he felt that he was disdained by those who hated him, and despised by those who liked him. He restrained ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... mind. This Anaxagoras was called Nous, or Intelligence, by the men of that day, either because they admired his own intellect, or because he taught that an abstract intelligence is to be traced in all the concrete forms of matter, and that to this, and not to chance, the universe owes ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... complex, from the particular to the general, the concrete before the abstract, and all, step by step, and even by insensible degrees—these were among his leading principles of method. But the most important of all his principles was derived from the scholastic maxim quoted above. As all is from sense, let the thing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Central and South African Negroes never really lose the primitive in them despite the claims of uplifters and sentimentalists. Actual contact is a disillusioning thing. I heard of a concrete case when I was in the Belgian Congo. A Belgian judge at a post up the Kasai River acquired an intelligent Baluba boy. All personal servants in Africa are called "boys." This particular native learned French, acquired European ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... These concrete issues finally banished the discussion of general principles. Natt had not entirely accounted for the strange circumstances when he jumped into his seat and drove away. But the old idea of Paul's dubious conduct was still fermenting; the froth ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... similar to the arithmetic, and in conjunction with the arithmetic, drawing, and construction work. Since geometrical forms involve numerical relations, they supply good materials to use in making number relations concrete and clear. This is now done in developing ideas of fractions, multiplication, division, ratio, per cent, etc. It should be done much more fully and variously than at present and for the double purpose of practising the form-ideas as well ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... them altogether, and one evil minded black Tom in particular. My aunt called him Beauty, in happy ignorance that all her household called him a Beast. I admire beauty in the abstract; I also like it in the concrete; and in the concreted form of youthful feminine humanity I love it. But that feline black Beauty was the most outrageous misnomer unhanged. I had tried to hang him several times, down in the cellar ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... suggestions as to changes and adaptations, and, receiving her approval, he went on to show her what had been already accomplished. Back on higher ground a reservoir of concrete was being constructed near an ever-flowing spring of snow water from the peaks. This water was being piped by gravity to the house, and was a matter of greatest satisfaction to Hoyle, for he claimed that it would never freeze in winter, and would be cold and abundant during the hottest and driest ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... field. One may sigh that it is not possible to perpetuate for all time for the benefit of others the vast mass of learning which such men as Dr. Garnett are able to accumulate. One may lament even more that one is not able to present in some concrete form, as an example to those who follow, his fine qualities of heart and mind—his generous faculty for 'helping lame dogs ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The image of the "presence" whatever it was, waiting there for him to go—this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short—he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... but Jethro had had enough to do with the church on hot summer Sundays, when "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution: to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough for the boy to say he preferred business, and that he wanted uncle Silas to take him into his upholstery shop; and he never, so long ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... familiarity of the previous speaker with political theories. But he has wandered from the field of theory into that of practice. He has announced with complete assurance to me and to this assembly what each European cabinet will probably do in this concrete case. These are the very things which, I believe, I must know better than he. This belief I have expressed. The previous speaker has referred to his activity in theoretical politics as a professor through many years. If the gentleman had served even one year in practical politics, possibly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... corrugated iron shed which had been erected in the garden, and dignified by the name of laboratory. For, to the boys' great delight, a model furnace had been made, with bellows, and a supply of charcoal was always ready. There was a great cast-iron mortar fitted on a concrete stand, crucibles of various sizes, and the place looked ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... knee-cap violently against a bollard close by the water's edge, and staggering under the anguish of it, had lost his footing and collapsed overboard. Then, finding that his fingers could take no hold on the slippery concrete wall of the basin, with his sound leg he had pushed himself out from it and grasped the barge's head-rope. All this, between groans, he managed to explain to the policeman, who, having sent for an ambulance stretcher, called for volunteers to carry him home; for ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... electricity all right; but you see he's not progressive—he has no 'git up and git,' as they say around here. Of course, he expects to find electric lights and concrete sidewalks in town, but electric lights on his farm and good roads from here to town would never enter his head," was ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... philosophical, and I perceive you have a tendency that way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of sentiment perhaps, but no slumgullion about political economy nor social strata or such stuff. Make it concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life, crisp and crackling ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... tastefully. Everything at the chalet is charmingly simple, with the simplicity which can't be got under a hundred thousand francs. Our ground-floor rests on cellars, which are built of millstone and embedded in concrete; it is almost completely buried in flowers and shrubs, and is deliciously cool without a vestige of damp. To complete the picture, a fleet of white swans sail ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... on, through, endless boulevards, some bustling, some dingy, some tawdry and flaring, some melancholy and mean; rows of garden gods, planted on the walls of yards full of vases and divinities of concrete, huge railway halls, monster hotels, dissenting chapels in the form of Gothic churches, quaint ancient almshouses that were once built in the fields, and tea-gardens and stingo-houses and knackers' yards. They were in a district far beyond the experience of Lothair, which indeed ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... religion and the symbolism of the Chinese pagoda expresses the same idea. He says that Kheen or Shang-te, the Chinese deities of sex, are also worshipped in the form of serpents, of which the dragon of the Chinese is a modification. This furnishes a concrete instance in which the mound of earth is of phallic significance, and substantiates an interpretation of serpent worship to which we shall ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... the high pressure in B, and then the men are lowered to the bottom. Excavated earth is removed in a similar manner. Air is supplied through a tube DD. Such an arrangement for work under water is called a caisson. It is held in position by a mass of concrete EE. ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... a party of three men should travel to Cape Crozier from winter quarters during the winter months in order to secure emperor penguins' eggs. The ship was to call at Cape Crozier, land provisions, and erect a small hut of fibro-concrete sheets for the use of this party. The ship was off the Cape on the afternoon of January 9, and a boat put off with Stenhouse, Cope, Joyce, Ninnis, Mauger, and Aitken to search for a landing-place. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... sentences and his sentences into forlorn and ungregarious words. When he looked to his first book for comfort he found the same horrid phenomenon taking place in its familiar pages. Sometimes when he was disheartened by his fruitless efforts he slipped out into the streets, fixing his attention on concrete objects to rest his tired mind. But he could not help noticing that London had discovered the secret which made his intellectual life a torment. The streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses, London herself was more than a tangled skein of streets, and overhead ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... aims to illustrate the working of certain factors in social organization and evolution by the study of concrete problems, interpretation has been emphasized rather than the social facts themselves. However, the book is not intended to be a contribution to sociological theory, and no attempt is made to give a systematic presentation of theory. Rather, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... low, brown crumbling cliffs crowned with green wreaths of tamarisk. The sea comes creeping up, or else the wind raises great white breakers; if the waves are quiet, old breakwaters, long ago broken themselves, smashed fragments here and there of concrete protections put by man, gaps in the cliff and changes in the coast-line, remind us of the vast force behind the gentle and persistent lap of water. The beach itself reminds us of it; there a flint and here a rounded ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... call his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge . . . ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of her soul. Had Gay been able to see her soul it would probably have moved him, for he was easily stirred by the thing that was beneath the eyes. But it was impossible to present a woman's soul to him as a concrete image. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... for your own limited circle—for the working class. Oh, I know what a busy agitator you are; you make speeches, you stir people up; but when some concrete instance of progress presents itself—as now, in the case of our machines—you do not want to have anything to do with it; ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... the sense of height made Jim quiver. To master this he fixed his mind on the details of structure underneath. Line on line the delicate tracery of steel waiting for its concrete sheathing was silhouetted below him. The night wind rushed past and he braced himself automatically, noting at the same time how the vibration of the steel cobweb was like a marvelous faint tune. The wonder of conception and workmanship ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... his Jewish training the slightest appreciation of the spiritual power of Judaism or of the divine purpose illustrating itself in the rise and fall of nations. His conception of history is a biography of might, tempered by occasional manifestations of divine retribution. The concrete event is the important thing, and of culture and literature he says scarcely a word. His occasional moral reflections are on a mediocre plane and not true to the finer spirit of Judaism. He is consciously or unconsciously obsessed by the power ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... such a small thing as a packet of seed. In reality it is not nearly so much trouble as it sounds, and then, too, this is for the first season only. You will have a well built frame lasting for years—forever, if you want to take a little more time and make it of concrete instead of boards. ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... very improbable that the chalk should have been swallowed for the sake of the very little organic matter which could have percolated into it from the poor overlying pasture. Lastly, a casting thrown up through the concrete and decayed mortar between the tiles, with which the now ruined aisle of Beaulieu Abbey had formerly been paved, was washed, so that the coarser matter alone was left. This consisted of grains of quartz, micaceous slate, other rocks, and bricks or tiles, many of them ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... understand 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
... interpretation of, knowledge, made in terms of the religious experience. It is taking truth out of its compressed and abstract form, its impersonal and scientific language, and returning it to life in the terms of the ethical and spiritual experience of mankind, thus giving it such concrete and pictorial expression that it stimulates the imagination and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... horrible thoughts had taken concrete form in her brain, she heard the grounding of arms outside, close to the door, and Desgas' voice shouting "Halt!" ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... had never felt before about anyone. She realised that this curiosity had dawned in her almost at the first moment when she saw the stranger, and had been growing ever since. One circumstance after another had increased it till now it was definite, concrete. She wondered that she did not feel ashamed of such a feeling so unusual in her, and surely unworthy, like a prying thing. Of all her old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the most sturdy, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, "The imaginative intellect." He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had nothing to do. He would stand wrapped in the delight of what he counted its beauty, and yet more in the delight that his was the mind that had generated such a meteor! ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... loss so much more readily comprehended and supplied, that we can hardly blame any one for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one hundred and twenty-five pages of her own work in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... their candidates have received. You may now often hear among them not only the unqualified defence of your constitutional rights, but the vindication of your institutions in the abstract, and in the concrete. ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... mild spirit of salt ammoniac, I mixed a dram of magnesia in very fine powder which had been previously deprived of its air by fire; and observing that the magnesia had a tendency to concrete into a solid mass, I shook the vial very frequently. After some days the powder was increased to more than double its former bulk; and when the vial was opened, the alkaline spirit emitted a most intolerably pungent ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... loafing which invariably takes place upon the occasion of the relaying of the wooden pavement. I say wooden more particularly, inasmuch as new fangled varieties of pavement, such as Concrete, Nicholson, etc., although they have their day, cannot be said to compete for a moment in public regard with the good old ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... not true," he said first. "I should welcome any hint of absence of mind in myself as a sign that the abstract could exclude the concrete, which is unfortunately not the case with me." Then, in a moment, he said, "People have no business to tell such stories. I should not mind their not being true, if they were ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... must eventually always depend upon prices of produce raised by the labour for which such wages are expended, when the agricultural labourer buys his bread he is only buying back his own labour in a concrete form plus the other relative expenses on the farm, and the cost of milling, baking, and distribution, so that when he gets a high price for his labour he must expect to pay a high price for his food; and when the price of food is reduced ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... window to its fullest extent, threw his leg over the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which ran a leaded gutter, in the direction of the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... inspiring influence. He was fond of children, and the sight of a poor little French peasant girl seems to have been one of the main causes leading him to become an ardent revolutionist. The Prelude tells in concrete fullness how he walked along the banks of the Loire with his ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... and fifty feet in width and some fifty in height, stood among the trees ahead. It was almost invisible from any distance; the concrete dome was of mottled green and gray concrete, trees grew so close as to brush it with their branches, and the little pavilion on the flattened top was roofed with translucent green plastic. As the airboat came in, a couple of men in ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... stood on the edge of this large, middlewestern city. Off to the back of the school were the towers of the town, great monolithic skyscrapers of pre-stressed concrete and plastic. To the front of the school the plains stretched out ...
— There Will Be School Tomorrow • V. E. Thiessen
... went rapidly down the draughty passages and the concrete stairs. Jasper was standing inside the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed by the cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumental inscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retained their concrete imagery to the end; and the images, though abridged and simplified, never lost their resemblance;[46] and if it is necessary to know something more than the particular animal or thing which they represent ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... students thanked Dick and the others for what had been done for them. The broken flagstaff was hauled away by the laborers of the place, and inside of a week a new pole, much larger than the old one, and set in concrete, was put up. ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... empty or without finishing the wine." This was to me the most perplexing problem of all that Ruskin put before me, for it was the first time that the doctrine of Calvin had come before me in a concrete form. Another incident gave me a serious perplexity as to the accuracy of Ruskin's perceptions of nature. Leslie had given me a card to see Mr. Holford's collection of pictures, in which was one of Turner's, the balcony scene in Venice, called, I think, "Juliet and her Nurse." It was a moonlight, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the enumerated items, his distaste for such a petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing him outside into the mellow end of the day. A figure darkened the doorway; it was Caroline. "I hardly saw him," she declared hotly. "Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his buttonhole." Her hoops flattened as she made her way through the narrow entrance. "There's one thing ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... country. People demand manifestations and signs, and will flock to any who can promise them. To this class the Book of Mormon, with its definite sort of mysticism, appealed strongly. The promises of a new Zion were concrete; the power was centralized, so that people who had heretofore been floundering in doubt felt they could lean on authority, and shake off the personal responsibility that had weighed them down. The Mormon communities grew ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the next morning, and both Sanders and Hamilton came down to the concrete quay to see the Zaire start on her journey. Sanders gave his ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... reinforcement of the contempt with which women normally regard their husbands—a contempt grounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To this primary sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a concrete comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the fact that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the typical husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it than his wife. He is, taking averages, one who has been ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the intellect, almost all its most familiar and ordinary acts are those of synthesis. In all the phenomena of perception, the separate sensations are combined by an act of the judgment into the concrete ideas of form and substance, while the highest and most permanent characteristic of science is in the comprehensive attainment of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Charter, and a desire for privacy.—Ah! It won't be long now. There's the Otpens!" Alexander pointed at a smudge on the horizon that quickly resolved into an irregular chain of tiny islets that slipped below them. Kennon got a glimpse of gray concrete on one of the larger islands, a smudge of green trees, and white beaches against which the yellow waters dashed ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... vehicles of all sorts, from wonderfully upholstered automobiles to the resuscitated victoria. The shop windows were laden with the treasures of the world, buyers were plentiful, promenaders multitudinous. Every one seemed to be cheerful but a little engrossed in the concrete act of living. Nigel almost ran into Prince Karschoff, at the corner of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... abstracted from the absence of war, finds no corresponding word in his language. Even friendship only means that relation, in which friends may be of use to each other. As his dialects are all synthetic,[18] his ideas are all concrete. To say, "I love" without expressing what or whom I love, would be, so to speak, very bad Indian grammar. He can not even say "two" correctly, without applying the numeral to some object. The notion ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... to respectability, recall Calvary Alley as a region of swarming tenements, stale beer dives, and frequent police raids. The sole remaining trace of those unregenerate days is the print of a child's foot in the concrete walk just where it leaves the court and turns into the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... gentleman worthy of the name attacked an unarmed man, the preparedness of the parties made all the difference between murder and fair fight. Of course, in the abstract, stealing was stealing under all conditions, and killing killing, and both open to condemnation; but in the concrete, in fact, the equality of the two persons made all the difference, at least ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... additional centimes which increase it. Such is the case with those who are infirm or burdened with a family. The exchequer, so as not to convert them into beggars and vagabonds, avoids expropriation, selling out their concrete hovel, vegetable garden, and small field of potatoes or cabbages; it gives them receipts gratis, or, at least, refrains from prosecuting them.[4212] In this way the poor peasant, although a land-owner, again exempts himself, or is exempted from his local indebtedness. In truth, he pays nothing, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in the file mentioned the Pentagon major and his concrete proof of Venus. I couldn't find this concrete proof in the file so I asked around about the major. The major, I found, was an officer in the Pentagon who had at one time written a short intelligence summary about UFO's. He had ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... 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
... a certain interest in their needs and affairs. His practical knowledge was enormous. I think I have told you of the completeness of his arrangements—everything had been foreseen from grindstones to gas nippers. The same quality of concrete speculation showed him what we lacked in our ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... these dry definitions, I should ill exemplify that method of teaching this branch of physical science, which it is my chief business to-night to recommend. Let us turn away then from abstract definitions. Let us take some concrete living thing, some animal, the commoner the better, and let us see how the application of common sense and common logic to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us into all these branches of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... much loveliness; 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 white-domed ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... 'thinks,' I say 'knows'—that he can sell! We are offering some of the stock of the 'Heart Talks' concern upon the market, and in order that the distribution may be as wide as possible, and in order also that we can furnish a living, concrete, flesh-and-blood example of what salesmanship is, or rather what it may be, we're going to give those of you who are the real thing a chance to sell that stock. Now, I don't care what you've tried to sell before or how you've tried to sell it. It don't matter how old you are or how young you ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... arrived there a little conversation took place between the lady of the house, Miss Stiles, Miss Dobell and Dr. Puddifoot, that her presence would most certainly have hindered. Mrs. Combermere was once described by some one as "constructed in concrete"; and that was not a bad description of her, so solid, so square and so unshakable and unbeatable was she. She wore stiff white collars like a man's, broad thick boots, short skirts and a belt at her waist. Her black hair was brushed ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... striking pictures to make the difficult questions which form the essential theme of the book acceptable to a wider circle of readers than I could have expected to reach by a dry systematic treatment. In the second place, I wished, by means of the concrete form thus given to a part of my abstractions, to refute by anticipation the criticism that those abstractions, though correct in thesi, were nevertheless inapplicable in praxi. Whether I have succeeded in these two ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Maya, I think it far more than likely that, when at last deciphered, it will be found to contain most if not all of these classes—mutatis mutandis. There seems every evidence that it is made up of pictures with probably both concrete and abstract meanings; word-conventions; and grammatical particles. It is at least probable that there are also silent determinatives and not unlikely that there is also a pure phonetic or alphabetic element. That the latter ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... concrete base; and concrete took 14 days to harden, but the Krupp experts brought a new concrete that hardened in 24 hours, and, within a week from leaving its home, the great Krupp demon began to ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... economics, and psychology, and to use them in explaining any situation which might seem to require their assistance; but these remarks were brief and incidental, and bore a very definite relation to the concrete ideas they were ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... or his enemy became assimilated with those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent, the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the life-destroying powers of water, and composite monsters ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... his mind was turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic fields, and to the more visible conditions of social stability and the growth of nations. This interest in the concrete phenomena of society inspired him with the idea of the Annual Register (1759), which he designed to present a broad grouping of the chief movements of each year. The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it was begun in the midst of that momentous war ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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 ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... being thus the respectable hint that I had with such avidity picked up, what would be the story to which it would most inevitably form the centre? It is part of the charm attendant on such questions that the "story," with the omens true, as I say, puts on from this stage the authenticity of concrete existence. It then is, essentially—it begins to be, though it may more or less obscurely lurk, so that the point is not in the least what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably, where to put one's ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the method used and described by Dr. Crane and Dr. McKay in the 1946 report of this Association. Crimp top cans were used with nail holes in the top and bottom. Instead of using regular storage facilities, the cans were stored in a concrete block storage pit built below the floor of the garage. This proved very successful. Not only were the nuts in excellent condition for eating in the spring, sweet and of good flavor, but a much larger ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... ankles at almost every step, glistened in the sun, and burned the feet like particles of fire, and as the ocean winds swept it, it darkened the air and filled the eyes and nostrils. There was no defense against it, and every wound speedily became covered with a concrete of gore and sand. Tent pins would not hold in the treacherous sand, every vigorous blast from the sea, overturned the tents, leaving the occupants exposed to the storm or the torrid sun. It was here, under the fire of the heaviest of the rebel batteries, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... treading out leaves with bare feet, working over great wicker baskets stained to tobacco color, piling up wooden frames, or operating the powerful hydraulic presses which convert the soft tobacco into plugs of concrete hardness—so one goes on through the factory. The browns and blacks of these interiors are the browns and blacks of etchings; the color of the leaves, the old dark timbers, the black faces and hands, and ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the early writings of Gregory the Patriarch, and in the catechisms of the Bohemian Brethren, the "essentials" are such things, and such things only, as faith, hope, love and the doctrines taught in the Apostles' Creed; and the "non-essentials," on the other hand, are such visible and concrete things as the church on earth, the ministry, the sacraments, and the other means of grace. In essentials they could allow no compromise; in non-essentials they gladly agreed to differ. For essentials they often shed their blood; but ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... seeking after identity of consciousness with the One, the Hindu Avatars are only a part of the delusion, the Maya, in which men are steeped. To a pantheist, holding that his own consciousness of individuality is delusion, born of spiritual darkness and ignorance, the conception of an avatar or concrete presentation of deity as an individual is only still grosser delusion. "The name of God and the conventions of piety are as unreal as anything else in Maya," writes a modern British apostle of Hinduism, while advocating the realisation of Maya as our salvation.[88] ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... body as the emissaries threw him on the concrete floor had tended to bring Locke back to consciousness. For a moment he lay still. Then the sound of the descending elevator attracted his attention. He gazed upward and dimly saw the slowly moving platform. In a ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... and premature convictions to value rightly his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely because he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of his own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where he got his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking at him.' ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... were not being subjected to hostile shelling, the enemy devoted most of his time in endeavouring to destroy the numerous O.P.'s dotted about here and there. These were constructed for the most part of reinforced concrete, but the particular one used by us, called "Frascatis," had not yet been discovered, so we were free to carry out shoots to ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... most characteristic and original tales this body was not to be one of external fact, but of moral thought. His genius contained a primary element of reflection, of meditation on life, of the abstract; and while his imagination might take its start and find an initial impulse, an occasion, in some concrete object on which it fastened, its course in working itself out was governed by this abstract moral intention. In dealing with life directly, and not through history, the tales which are at the least remove from mere observation are those that were immediately suggested by his ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... shown up as a sneak and your own dad as a crook—well, you can't blame a green hand for holdin' prejudice against the town that raised 'em. She'll get over it; but just now I cal'late some little flat, or, better still, a little home out where the back yards ain't made of concrete, would be a first-class port for us to make for. Don't know of such a place at a reasonable rent, ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 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 ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... its historic past, a mean, squalid, decaying little place. Being built almost entirely of wood, the town had sustained but little injury, but the massive concrete fort at the end of the peninsula had slid bodily into the sea, six-inch guns and all. Some twenty cocoa-nut palms it had taken with it were standing in the water, their brown withered tops just peering above ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... millions. Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt and cousin, home, family—none of these words had any place in the freedman's vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... crystal, pricked with glittering yellow. There were, perhaps, a thousand of these little points bared from the jealous earth, and they shone with a steady baleful glare, magnetising six youthful eyes, stirring in three careless brains the ghosts of ancient gold-lust, whose concrete substance lay in the marble vaults of Spain. Immediately Roldan's sympathy went out to the priest; and he knew that that commanding intelligence could teach him one thing ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... monstrously vigorous; at times over-strong and over-vital, exaggerative of nature, but never really unnatural, and he never once overreached himself in an effort. No matter how enormous the conception might be, he never lacked the means of carrying it to the concrete. No giantism of limb and feature was beyond the ability of his brush; no astounding foreshortening was too much for his unerring point; no vast perspective was too deep for his knowledge and strength. His production was limited only by the length of his life. Great genius ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... pallor, by the discharge of internal glandular secretions as well as by inhibition of appetite, by vomiting, gastric discomfort, or diarrhoea. Naturally enough, mothers and nurses are wont to demand a concrete cause for the constant crying of a little child, and teething, constipation, the painful passage of water, pain in the head, or colic and indigestion are suggested in turn, and powders, purges, or circumcision demanded. There can be no doubt that ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... burst, but it was slow progress at best, and always the terror grew upon her. Had Danglar met the men yet who had looted the millionaire's safe? Had he already joined Skeeny in that old room behind Shluker's place? Had the Sparrow—She would not let her mind frame that question in concrete words. The Sparrow! His real name was Martin, Martin Finch—Marty, for short. Times without number she had visited the sick and widowed mother—while the Sparrow had served a two-years' sentence for his first conviction in safe-breaking. The ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... it is a favourite play of my memory to take up the thought of what you were to me (to my mind gazing!) years ago, as the poet in an abstraction—then the thoughts of you, a little clearer, in concrete personality, as Mr. Kenyon's friend, who had dined with him on such a day, or met him at dinner on such another, and said some great memorable thing 'on Wednesday last,' and enquired kindly about me perhaps on Thursday,—till I was proud! and so, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... nation is often referred to as revealing the civilization of the period. Surely the scientific literature which deals with concrete facts is an exact indicator of the technical knowledge of a period! That little was known of natural gas and doubtless of artificial gas in the seventeenth century is shown by a brief report entitled "A Well and Earth in Lancashire taking Fire at a Candle," by Tho. Shirley in the Transactions ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Morse's discoveries and inventions; just as the discoveries and inventions of earlier and contemporary scientists were essential to Henry's improvements. But it is also just to place emphasis on the fact that Henry's experiments were purely scientific. He never attempted to put them in concrete form for the use of mankind in general; they led up to the telegraph; they were not a practical telegraph in themselves. It was Morse who added the final link in the long chain, and, by combining the discoveries of ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... kind of compassionate tone—compassion rather for the trouble of his chief than for the supposed national tribulation. Hamilton was as generous-hearted a young fellow as could be, but his affections were more evidenced in the concrete than in the abstract. He had grown up accustomed to all these distracting social questions, and he did not suppose that anything very much was likely to come of them—at any rate, he supposed that if anything were to come of them it would come of itself, and that we could not do much to help ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 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 ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... gaudiest attire, bead-decked shirts and fringed leggings, their supple feet clad in embroidered moccasins, outshone even the most magnificent of "Wild West" shows; and without a spoken word each understood the desire of their Chief. They rode to the semi-circle of concrete before the main entrance to the great house and ranged themselves around it, the Chief in front, alone, and as the last hoof fell into position where the rider wished, they became as rigid as a company of warriors carved ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... 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 fullness ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... has the disadvantage that it does not carry any distance; (3) it is useless in the dark; (4) it is vague in character; (5) it is imitative in nature and permits only of the intercommunication of ideas based upon concrete images. Speech, on the other hand, is transmitted in the dark and with objects intervening; moreover, distance affects its transmission much less. The images of auditory and visual symbols in the growth of speech replace in our minds concrete images and they permit of abstract thought. ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... forgetting that there is no insight without force to back it,—bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness,—he is thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to be upset and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles against. A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by presenting a vision of the object to which it leads;—beware of the conceit that dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... could be expected from a Congress which represented the commercial and landholding classes? No prodding was needed to cause it to give the fullest protection to possessions in commerce, land and negro slaves; these were concrete property. But thought was not capitalized; it was not a manufactured product like iron or soap. Nothing can express the pitying contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... deduced from my researches appearing likely to prove fruitful, I resolved to apply them to the study of concrete instances, and was thus led to deal with the Psychology of Revolutions—notably ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... for the poor things in every grade below them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is always water, for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the mountains—there is not much rainfall—and carried in little concrete channels along the road—side from village to village, something like those conduits the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the Maritime Alps to their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle of it the whole night long, and day ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... and the United States that Germany stole the typewriter, the steel building, the use of rubber, the aniline dyes, reenforced concrete bridges, ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Milton tells us, without the least ambiguity, what a spectator of these marvellous occurrences would have witnessed. I doubt not that his poem is familiar to all of you, but I should like to recall one passage to your minds, in order that I may be justified in what I have said regarding the perfectly concrete, definite picture of the origin of the animal world which ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... lee side, Aaron had nailed thin, horizontal strips of wood about a foot apart, hoping to encourage the mud-daubing birds he'd seen on the wall at Datura to plaster their nests onto his barn, and shop for insects in his fields. Lacking concrete, he'd constructed a roofless stone hut abutting the barn to serve as his manure shed. The farmhouse itself was a bit gay, having an inside toilet to cheat the Murnan winters and a sunporch for Martha's ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... terrestrial ball one illimitable fry turned over and well done,—a fry ever doing and never done, which should simmer and fizzle on eternally down the ages. An abstract fry—let me here record it—suits me passing well; yet I like not the concrete and personal broil. I trip gayly to a feast, prepared to eat, but not, as in the supper of Polonius, to be eaten. I have very little of the martyr-stuff about me. It is well, it is glorious, to read of those fine things; but does any man relish the application of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... constructions of concrete. Standing within them one is impressed as by the mass of the Pyramids. The gates are hollow structures of steel, 7 feet thick. Their lower portions are water-tight, so that their buoyancy in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Versailles, but, if these opponents of the plan will go back to the time of which I am writing, and avoid the impressions made upon them by subsequent events, they will find, I believe, that even their own views have materially changed since December, 1918. It is true that concrete plans had then been suggested, but so far as the public knew the President had not adopted any of them or formulated one of his own. He had not then disclosed ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... always was, but he had learned from Bishop Butler, whom he reverenced profoundly and spoke of as "the Copernicus of ethics," that there is no practice more fatal to moral strength than dreaming divorced from action. Some concrete act, some definite thing to be done, was now always in his mind, but always, it may be added, as the realisation of some principle arrived at by serious and accurate thinking. He had acquired clear convictions, his powers of application were enormous, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... woman loves concrete applications. She is your only true pragmatist. If a philosophy will not work, says ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... all the considerations, on one side or the other, of this question, would demand more space, and more of technical detail, than the scope of these papers permits. As with most conclusions of a concrete character dealing with contradictory elements, the result reached will inevitably be rather an approximation than an absolute demonstrable certainty; a broad general statement, not a narrow formula. All rules of War, which is not an exact science, but an art, have this characteristic. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... Megaera ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the woman's fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly joyful ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... typical March 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
... question about the order of the other forms. Description, still dealing with the concrete, offers an admirable opportunity for shaping and forming the spontaneous expression gained in narration. Following description, in order of ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... riches of God's grace, they were high above us, when we looked upon 'the power that worketh in us,' we saw it working amidst many hindrances and hamperings, but here there is presented to us in a concrete example, close beside us, of what God can make of a man when the man is wholly pliable to His will, and the recipient of His influences. And so there stands before us the guarantee and the pattern of immortal life, the Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... conception is Lord Kelvin. The idea was born in his mind of a happy union of mathematical calculations with concrete experiments. The mathematical calculations were largely the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who, about the year 1858, had undertaken to solve some unique problems in vortex motions. Helmholtz found that a vortex whirl, once established in a frictionless medium, must go on, theoretically, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there. Critics give themselves great labor to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples; —to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better recognized by being felt in ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... we have allegorical 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, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... superhuman size and strength even when raised so far above the ground. They have a simple robustness that accords well with their theme. Two of the Powers are abstract, the driving powers of thought; these are Invention and Imagination. Two are concrete, representing the mightiest powers of modern mechanics, Steam Power and Electric Power. Steam Power is forcing the driving arm of an engine; Electric Power, the world at his feet, handles the lightnings. He wears the winged cap of Mercury, ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... that as a rule never gets any farther than being thought of, or possibly seeing daylight as an "esquisse" - but seldom any farther than that. The Burnham plan for San Francisco was such an unrealized dream, but here the dream has achieved concrete form. The buildings as a group have all the big essential qualities that art possesses only in its noblest expression. Symmetry, balance, and harmony work together for a wonderful expression of unity, of oneness, ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... is brought fully up-to-date, including such recent events as the British Parliament Act of 1911, the Italian-Turkish War, and the Balkan War, 1912-1913. Each topic is made definite and concrete, and such important subjects as the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany are ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... a great and varied literature, as a record of many of the most important events in human history, and as a concrete revelation of God's character and will through the life and experiences of a race and the hearts of inspired men, the Old Testament has a vital message marvellously adapted to the intellectual, moral, social, and spiritual needs of to-day and supremely ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... day and no more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times—coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)—a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... spite of heavy rifle and machine-gun fire directed at him, and the fact that the going was necessarily slow, owing to the awful state of the ground, he approached Varlet Farm then reported to be in the hands of the enemy. Entering a concrete building alone he found it occupied by a small British garrison, who were exhausted and almost without ammunition and the most of them wounded. After investigating the ground thoroughly he returned and led up three platoons of a company of this battalion and relieved ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity were exceedingly small. His immense reputation in the Treasury, his sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of the Prohack family. Then she would be brave; she would be bravely resigned to the worst. She would kiss his innocence. She would quite unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of a fellow and the smartest ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... tyranny then dominant at the South the southern Baptists might not fall behind their Methodist neighbors in zeal for slavery. This time it was the South that forced the issue. The Alabama Baptist Convention, without waiting for a concrete case, demanded of the national missionary boards "the distinct, explicit avowal that slave-holders are eligible and entitled equally with non-slave-holders to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions." The answer of the Foreign ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... were cast in the United States, did it not behoove me to draw upon the country's increasing prosperity and to help to increase it? Texas did not matter. I did not fancy the institution of slavery. It grated upon my sensibilities; but I had a very slight understanding of it in the concrete. I was glad that England was rid of it. I had never admired the Wesleys, the Methodists; but I was glad to give them credit for what they had done to relieve England of such an abomination. I rejoiced that more than seven years before I was born Clarkson ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... the fire itself had been a legacy from the earliest tribes; but it remained for the Rosicrucians and the fire philosophers of the Sixteenth Century under the lead of Paracelsus to establish a concrete religious belief on that basis, finding in the Scriptures what seemed to them ample proof that fire was the symbol of the actual presence of God, as in all cases where He is said to have visited this earth. He came either in a flame of fire, or surrounded with glory, which they ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... But she was emboldened to mention her father's discarded pepper-and-salt trousers. At the first she didn't intend really to appropriate them, but Tess caught up the idea enthusiastically. She immediately began making concrete plans and, soon, Missy caught her fervour. That picture of herself as a dashing, fearless horsewoman ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the nature of music by a clear recognition of what it is not, and by a comparison with the more definite and familiar arts. Music consists of the intangible and elusive factors of rhythm and sound; in this way differing fundamentally from the concrete static arts such as architecture, sculpture and painting. Furthermore, instrumental music, i.e., music freed from a dependence on words, is not an exact language like prose and poetry. It speaks to our feelings ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... her, even as she to him, hoping that this individual love would prove itself capable of overriding all else that existed. But it had not needed that she should speak to show him how pathetically he had erred. Before she had made a concrete instance he knew how hopeless his wish had been: the silence, the loosening of hands had told him that. And when she spoke there was a brutality in what she said, and worse than the brutality there was ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... soldiery, the crews of the Italian war-ships were not permitted to go ashore with the sailors of the other nations, as Admiral Andrews feared that their presence might provoke unpleasant incidents. Hence their "shore leave" had, for nearly six months, been confined to the narrow concrete Molo, where they were permitted to stroll in the evenings and where the Italian girls of the town came to see them. For a Jugoslav girl to have been seen in company with an Italian sailor would have meant her social ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... partitions and watching the spectacle or sitting with drink before them at the little marble tables at the back. The gaudy, gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect. I wondered why I, a creature from the concrete world, was there. I had an insane impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and wander, wander for ever, away from the world. I was walking along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, when I stumbled ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... are rescued and made happy by circumstances To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common Twice a bad thing to turn sinners loose What a man hates in adversity is to see 'faces' What else is so consolatory to a ruined man? Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels You may learn to ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... that "no natural reason can be alleged why sovereignty should be fixed upon one person, or one set of persons, rather than upon another, short of the whole community." This is true, inasmuch as in the abstract we view men as men, in which specific character they are all equal. But in the concrete and real life, the primeval citizens who start a commonwealth are rarely alike and equal, as the founders of the American Republic at the separation from Great Britain pretty well were, but some men, or some order of men, will so much excel the rest in ability, position, or possessions, that the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... not yet in the Twentieth Century, not for all its speed mania, has any one come near to equalling the speed of a prose tale by Voltaire. "Candide" is a full book. It is filled with mockery, with inventiveness, with things as concrete as things to eat and coins, it has time for the neatest intellectual clickings, it is never hurried, and it moves with the most amazing rapidity. It has the rapidity of high spirits playing a game. The dry high spirits of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... concrete, unfortunately, I cannot do so," the Russian said. "I must speak of this lady we are both interested in—pray, try to listen to me calmly, sir, for we are here for the settling of a matter which concerns the happiness of our ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... businesslike practicability on the one hand and the utter absurdity of administration on the other, in all modes and methods, one is almost inclined to drop his pen in disgust at being unable to come to any concrete conclusions. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... processes of Nature that they have ceased to be men and become gods, and as such alone can we deal with them. It is also permissible to point out that in the case of Tammuz, Esmun, and Adonis, the title is not a proper name, but a vague appellative, denoting an abstract rather than a concrete origin. Proof of this will be found later. Sir W. Ridgeway overlooks the fact that it is not the tragic death of Attis-Adonis which is of importance for these cults, but their subsequent restoration to life, a feature which cannot be postulated of ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... natural freshwater resources: large concrete or natural rock water catchments collect rainwater (no longer used for drinking water) and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... corner he stopped, looking down the silent streets. Nothing moved. Brett went to a window in a grey concrete wall, pulled himself up to peer through the dusty pane, saw a room filled with tailor's forms, garment racks, a bicycle, bundled back issues of ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, — let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... is a sky-scraper? It is a giant bird-cage, whose interstices are filled with stone or concrete. Though its structure is concealed from the eye, it is impossible not to wonder at its superb effrontery. It depends for its effect, not upon ornament, which perforce appears trivial and inapposite, but upon its mass. Whatever ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... this is not considered necessary, as the heat developed by the chemical action between the phosphate and the acid is sufficiently great. The phosphate, after being thoroughly mixed with the acid, is discharged into what is technically known as the pit, a chamber built of brick or concrete. The mixture, which is in a fluid state when it enters the pit, very soon hardens, and is dug out in a day or two. It is next reduced to powder in a disintegrator, and is then ready ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... a Saturn or a Mars cannot be like ours. Their years and seasons are peculiar to themselves and their material conditions; hence the twelve constellations have no existence as objective facts of concrete formation or cosmic potentiality. No! But as unalterable symbols of occult truth, the starry pictures of the shining constellations have an eternal verity. They pertain to the living realities of the human ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... hen certainly exhibited an activity surprising in one of her years. By a hairbreadth she missed perfection. Uncle Jap had been known to hint, nothing more, that he would have liked a dozen or so of babies. The hint took concrete form in: "I think a heap o' young things, colts, kittens, puppies—an' the like." ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... discoursed upon the True, the Beautiful, the Good. He strove to disengage them from the concrete that he might derive some general formulae. To do this he employed the method of "elimination," a form of dialectics which I recommend to no one, notwithstanding its great value and the services it may render, after all, to those minds endowed ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... to the way in which we wish to represent the phenomena, we can imagine an idea of the solar system in which the planets follow paths of peculiar form and the rays of light shine along sharply bent lines—think of a twisted and distorted planetarium—but in every case where we apply it to concrete questions we shall so arrange it that the planets describe almost exact ellipses and the rays ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz |
