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Concrete   Listen
noun
Concrete  n.  
1.
A compound or mass formed by concretion, spontaneous union, or coalescence of separate particles of matter in one body. "To divide all concretes, minerals and others, into the same number of distinct substances."
2.
A mixture of gravel, pebbles, or broken stone with cement or with tar, etc., used for sidewalks, roadways, foundations, etc., and esp. for submarine structures.
3.
(Logic) A term designating both a quality and the subject in which it exists; a concrete term. "The concretes "father" and "son" have, or might have, the abstracts "paternity" and "filiety"."
4.
(Sugar Making) Sugar boiled down from cane juice to a solid mass.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books



... rule, who does not sympathise with Mr. Allgood, as against Mr. Goose, in his method of talk? Syllogisms, propositions, predicates, majors, minors, sorites, enthymeme, copula, concrete, and such-like logical terms are all very well from a professor to his students in a lecture room, but introduced into ordinary conversation in company they are altogether out of place. No one with good taste, unless he has fearfully forgotten it, will disfigure his ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... most sanitary method the average farmer has of handling the manure in dairying," said Percy, "is to keep it buried as much as possible under plenty of clean bedding; and one of the worst methods is to overhaul it every day by 'cleaning' the stable, unless you could have concrete floors throughout, and flush them well once or twice a day, thus losing a considerable part of the valuable excrement. If you allow the manure to accumulate for several weeks at a time, it is best to have ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins

... 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

... poem which is commonly misunderstood, Browning informs us that the true poet must deal, not with abstract thought, but with concrete things. A young poet informs an elder colleague that he has just launched a huge philosophical poem, called Transcendentalism: a Poem in Twelve Books. His wiser critic tells him that he is on the wrong track altogether; ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... a conviction of calamity which only took concrete form when she heard her brother's call issuing from the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... international: despite resistance from nomadic groups, the demarcation of the Saudi Arabia-Yemen boundary established under the 2000 Jeddah Treaty is almost complete; Yemen protests Saudi erection of a concrete-filled pipe as a security barrier in 2004 to stem illegal cross-border activities in sections of the boundary; Kuwait and Saudi Arabia continue discussions on a maritime boundary with Iran; because the treaties have not been made public, the exact alignment of the boundary with the UAE ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... 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 ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors clustered in a circle inside a windowless concrete building at the center of the plant. Beside their primary purpose of plutonium production, they furnished heat for the sea-water distillation and chemical extraction system, processing the water that was run through the steam boilers at the main power reactors, condensed, redistilled, and finally ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper

... into whose hands this volume falls will be deeply interested in the ideals of teaching implied in the concrete suggestions given in the following pages, for after all the value of any system of special methods rests, not merely on its apparent and immediate psychological effectiveness, but also on the social purposes which it is devised to serve. It must be recognized at the outset ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell

... Commission in his response; to which a leading journal of the Pacific coast, "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer," promptly added that the address "spoke for the whole people of the United States," and was "the concrete expression of a desire that animates nine tenths of all our citizens." Judge Taft frankly stated his concurrence in the views expressed (though he held some legal doubts as to whether the Constitution of the United States did not extend, ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... worsted industry is being ruined by the competition of Germany, must be unaware of the fact that the German worsteds, whose increasing exports were creating such alarm among the Fair-traders, are mainly composed of yarns 'made in Bradford.' Indeed, Bradford afforded a concrete example of the effect of German competition, for it would be difficult to say which country had benefited most by it. The export of woollen, worsted, and alpaca yarns to Germany in the average of the following periods of years amounted in 1880-85 to 41,500,000 ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox

... view of Eben Tollman failed to remove the initial dislike, and yet Farquaharson acknowledged that nothing concrete was added to the evidence of sheer prejudice. In his application to the business affairs of the minister, he was assiduous and untiring, and the invalid depended upon his advice as upon an infallible guidance. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... personification. There is nothing mysterious about the process; the leader does not "embody" a previously conceived idea, rather he begets it. From his personality springs the personification. The abstract idea arises from the only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete fact. Without perception there is no conception. We noted in speaking of dances (p. 43) how the dance got generalized; how from many commemorations of actual hunts and battles there arose the hunt dance and the war dance. So, ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... we needn't trouble ourselves any more about her,' retorted Miss Motley, who hated to be plagued about abstract questions, being a young woman of an essentially concrete nature, born to consume and digest three meals a day, and having no views that ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... death as threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of a future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender that something we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... at Trieste; there are also serious riots at Vienna, Goerz, Prague, and elsewhere; the Austrians have fortified the entire Italian frontier, at places having built intrenchments of concrete and cement. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... misunderstood. Let me not be supposed to be courting collision with the Berkleian thesis of the non-existence of abstract ideas. I do not for one moment doubt that all our general or class notions of sensible objects or events are merely concrete ideas of individual objects or events—that, for instance, whenever we talk of man or motion in general, we are really thinking of some particular man or motion, which, as possessing all properties common to all men or motions, serves as a representative of the entire genus. ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... discipline the understanding that wisdom could be realized without process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he had no love for the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of speculative deism. Let me also say this for my friend,—that his directing stimulus to action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but what, had it been directed to any recognized end, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... to the ground and opened his mouth to speak. But his knees grew weak and he quivered all over like one who beholds the god. The abstract nebulous romance of his pilgrimage had been crystallized, in a flash, into the concrete. "Ay," ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... attached to ancient 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" had been applied, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... spectacle as the world can show. Not one of these men but heartily believed himself justified in reviling the traitor to his class, the betrayer of confiding innocence. Remember, too, how it facilitates speech to have a concrete topic on which to enlarge; in this matter a West End drawing-room and the Hoxton coffee-shop are akin. Regularity of procedure was at an end; question grew to debate, and debate was riot. Mr. Cullen succeeded Mr. Cowes and roared himself hoarse, defying the ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... window of Mary's sitting room had been enlarged to glass doors, and from these a concrete path ran to the studio entrance. Mary planned to make it a covered way after ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... remarked that this was inconsistent with the old assertion that opposites generated opposites. But that, replies Socrates, was affirmed, not of opposite ideas either in us or in nature, but of opposition in the concrete—not of life and death, but of individuals living and dying. When this objection has been removed, Socrates proceeds: This doctrine of the mutual exclusion of opposites is not only true of the opposites themselves, but of things which are inseparable from them. For example, cold and heat ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato

... it contained. It is but a long series of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not become aware until the awakening of our memory; and its nucleus, of which we do not know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less concrete than a thought. If the new environment which we enter on leaving our mother's womb transforms us to such a point that there is, so to speak, no connexion between the embryo that we were and the man that we have become, is it not right to think that the ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck

... the possibilities of art; it promotes right ways of work and of study; it teaches the inventor and the discoverer how most surely and promptly to gain their several ends, it gives the world the results of all acquired knowledge in concrete form. This one instance which we are now especially interested in contemplating has performed more wonderful miracles than ever Aladdin's genii attempted. One man, with a steam engine at his hand, turns the wheels of a great mill, drives ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various

... ready for whatever attack might come. They still moved like men in a trance. Whether they could quite even realize the true character of Jannati Shahr seemed doubtful. The Inca's room of gold stunned Pizarro and his men. How much more, then, must a whole city of gold numb any concrete thought? ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... when, as a sweating newspaper reporter, he had, one dusk, watched in the park his uncle and Mrs. Denby drive past in the cool seclusion of a shining victoria. Curious! In itself the incident was small, but it had stuck in his memory more than others far more serious, as concrete instances are likely to do.... No, he wasn't sorry; not a bit! He was glad, despite the hesitation he experienced in saying to himself the final word. He had done his best, and this would mean his own release and Cecil's. It would mean at last ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... set among the nations, not as a dark lantern, but as the great lampstand in the Temple court proclaimed, to ray out light to all the world. Jonah's mission was but a concrete instance of Israel's charge. The nation was as reluctant to fulfil the reason of its existence as the Prophet was. Both begrudged sharing privileges with heathen dogs, both thought God's care wasted, and neither ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... "a close shave." To "refute" once meant literally "to knock out" an argument. To "understand" meant "to stand in the midst of." To "confer" meant "to bring together." Sensation words themselves were once still more concrete in their meaning. "Violet" and "orange" are obviously taken as color names from the specific objects to which they still refer. Language has well been described as "a book of faded metaphors." The history of language has been to a large extent the assimilation and ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... endeavouring to annihilate the Wick salient or some such target, one of our heaviest of heavy trench mortars dropped short (perhaps that is too much of a compliment to the particular shot) in our trenches near a company headquarters and almost upon a new concrete refuge, which the R.E. had just completed and not yet shown to the Brigadier. Though sometimes supplied, the co-operation of this arm ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... can be a very fast and complicated game. You could see jai alai played in specially built concrete courts in many cities in Spain, also in the state of Florida, right here in our own country. A jai alai court is called a "fronton." But in the Basque country you'd see all the men and boys in the village playing jai alai back of the church, using the high stone wall ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day

... visible illustrations. Actual exhibition before a class of the objects talked about, actual experiments of the operations described, and the constant use of the chalk and the blackboard, presenting even abstract truths in concrete and visible symbols, as is done in algebra, chemistry, and logic, are among the means by which, chiefly, knowledge becomes well defined to the mind. Such is the constitution of the mind, that we have a clearer apprehension of what we see than of what comes to us through any ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... A View of the Present State of Ireland shows that, far from shutting himself up in a fool's paradise of fancy, he was fully awake to the social and political condition of that turbulent island, and that it furnished him with concrete examples of those vices and virtues, bold encounters and hair-breadth escapes, strange wanderings and deeds of violence, with which he has crowded the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... Colman and imagine him cherishing sordid views of life. Asked 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 ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... we ask, for the parent whose intellect has been developed through training in his lifetime to transmit to his children any portion of this acquired increment of mental capacity, or, putting the question in more concrete terms, is it possible for a parent to transmit to his offspring any part of that power to increase the size and quality of the brain which may be assumed to have resulted in his own case from mental exercise? ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... largely through concrete illustrations which have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... compact, hard, impenetrable, firm, unyielding, imporous, concrete, substantial; unanimous, united, undivided. Antonyms: porous, incompact, hollow, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... got together under these strange circumstances, cannot well be expected to be the best that human ingenuity could devise; the wonder rather is to see them so good as they are. Who made them, ask me not. Made they clearly were; for we see them here in a concrete condition, writing despatches, and drawing salary with a view to buy pudding. But how those Offices in Downing Street were made; who made them, or for what kind of objects they were made, would be hard to say at present. Dim visions ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... everybody before the Benthamites. We, in the West, have now swung to the opposite extreme: we tend to think that technical efficiency is everything and moral purpose nothing. A battleship may be taken as the concrete embodiment of this view. When we read, say, of some new poison-gas by means of which one bomb from an aeroplane can exterminate a whole town, we have a thrill of what we fondly believe to be horror, but it is really delight in scientific skill. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... absorption. It must reveal itself to him at an early age, too, as early as his grammar-school days, for then it will be known as genuinely a part of him, and the outcropping of seeds correctly sown by his ancestors. Having this fondness for mathematics, which may be termed otherwise as a curiosity to make concrete ends meet—the working out of puzzles is one evidence of the gift—the young man is well armed for a successful career in the profession. He will like mathematics for its own sake, and when, later, in college, ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton

... Egypt stands at the opposite pole of thought as its antagonist. Instead of Spirit, it accepts Body; instead of Unity, Variety; instead of Substance, Form. It is the physical reaction from Brahmanism. Instead of the worship of abstract Deity, it gives us the most concrete divinity, wholly incarnated in space and time. Instead of abstract contemplation, it gives us ceremonial worship. Instead of the absorption of man into God, it gives us transmigration through all bodily forms.[169] It so completely incarnates God, as to make every type ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... respects most 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 clothes and became a model servant. When the judge went ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... more than a sentiment—even more than an epic. It is the symbol of my own soul, which is, I surmise, not unlike other souls. In it I see flung before me all the stern world-old struggle become materialized. Here is the concrete representation of the earnest desire, the momentarily frustrate purpose, the beating at the bars, the breathless fighting of the half-whipped but never-to-be-conquered spirit, the sobbing of the wind-broken runner, the anger, the madness, the laughter. And in it all ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... the words. He had been prepared to hear of a vast repose, and yet these concrete centuries ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... G.O.C., 29th Division, at their initial appearance before him. Whether the Guernsey's exceptional steadiness solicits approval, or if the rapid rhythmical movements in handling arms—quicker than is customary with other regiments—pleases the Official Eye cannot be accurately gauged. It is a concrete certainty, however, that the unit composes an efficient, compact body comparing very favourably ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... had been increased to 20,000 by an influx of Portuguese, Madeiran, and German immigrants, and for many years past the provincial government had spent their considerable surplus revenue in beautifying the city. The streets, formerly unpaved or strewn with loose stones and sand, were now laid with concrete in a most complete manner, all the projecting masonry of the irregularly- built houses had been cleared away, and the buildings made more uniform. Most of the dilapidated houses were replaced by handsome new edifices, having long and elegant balconies ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... landward gates seems to be indicated by the old ward boundaries, but modern investigators have neglected them. There was another Roman settlement, namely, at Westminster, where the abbey stands on the site of some older buildings. Roman concrete forms the foundation of the older part of the church and the dark cloisters. The pavement of a dwelling was found under the nave, and a sarcophagus, bearing a rudely carved cross, showed that the town was not walled. The Romans possibly ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... with 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

... 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 flash he ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... author's acquaintance with ornament amazes, and his three thousand subjects are gleaned from the finest which the world affords. As a treasury of ornament drawn to scale in all styles, and derived from genuine concrete objects, we have nothing in England which will not appear as poverty-stricken as compared with Professor ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day

... commencing thus with the limited or special interest of each group, may evolve in his own mind the plan which most naturally will lead the boys not only into a wider field of concrete facts, but also into the habit of seeing relationships, of drawing conclusions and of raising questions for ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... p.m.—The storm still continues. A large concrete block, weighing 300 tons, has been dislodged, and the whole building seems doomed unless the storm ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... straining; it did not know that the true objective of its effort was the common ownership of property. And, on the other hand, socialism did not know that the labor movement was the living form in which its spirit was embodied, the concrete practical force of which it stood in need. Marx was the most clearly convinced and the most powerful among those who put an end to the empiricism of the labor movement and the utopianism of the socialist ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... Psychurgy, the modern educator owes a heavy debt of gratitude! From the teachings of Prof. Gates, we deduce; that in brain building, that primary step in education, psychologic functioning creates organic structure, and that organic structure is a manifestation in the concrete, of the activities of the mind. In other words, that planted, watered and nourished, by the emotions of the individual, the thoughts, ideas, concepts and images which arise, create a corresponding growth of cell structure in the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... these words of Christ have been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too good for this world. In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the working of Christ's methods. In the saintlike career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation which his example works in the character of the hardened outlaw Jean Valjean, we have a most powerful commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. By some ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske

... 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 a little ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... must not prevent the further admission that it is exceedingly well done. Architecturally it is a curiosity, seeing that though it presents a stately and substantial front neither stone nor brick enters into its composition. It is made entirely of shingle mixed with mortar, the whole forming a concrete substance as durable as granite. The first pebble of the new hotel was laid quite a respectable number of years ago, the ceremony furnishing an almost dangerous flux of excitement to the mariners at the capstan. It has grown up slowly, as becomes an undertaking connected with Hythe. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... which had always faintly shimmered from the hole in the outer wall, was gone. As he drove forward headlong, he bruised his nose against the cause of its disappearance. The wall had been repaired with concrete. It was utterly ungnawable, and he slowly retraced his steps to the cellar. He was just in time to ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... houses of concrete," says The National News, "are now quite common in America." The only complaint, it appears, is that some of them are just a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various

... in the case of mountains. Besides the bare statement of figures, it is necessary to have some means for grasping the meaning of the figures. The bare tens and thousands must be clothed with some concrete images. The statement that a mountain is 15,000 feet high is, by itself, little more impressive, than that it is 3,000; we want something more before we can mentally compare Mont Blanc and Snowdon. Indeed, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... the necks of the bottles off against the concrete curbs, and drank. Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity. I hadn't. I still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all he could get—especially when it didn't cost anything. We shared our bottles with others, and drank a good ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... inquire, "How many understand this lesson?" or "How many got all the examples?" It is the teacher's business to test thoroughly for himself the pupil's mastery of the lesson or the knowledge or power required for the examples, in some definite and concrete way. It will not suffice to take the pupil's judgment of his own preparation and mastery, for many will allow a hazy or doubtful point to go by unexplained rather than confess before teacher and class their lack of study or inability to grasp the topic. Further, pupils seldom have the standards ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts

... liking her," began Moon, "I—but perhaps, as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question. I repeat that I do not mean to follow the abstract speculations. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true"—here he lowered his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness—"is it not equally ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... The concrete nature of the President's surroundings is at first perplexing, in view of our theory about his character. But it is evident that the world could never provide him with furniture corresponding to the texture of his mind; and hence he would instinctively lay ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... station bath in which the previous night he had had a plunge, and without examining, took a violent "header" into the tank, confidently expecting to strike from eight to ten feet of water. He dashed his head against the concrete bottom 12 feet below (the water two hours previously having been withdrawn) and crushed his brain and skull into an ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... I passed another farm down in Iowa, whose owner had tried to make his place conspicuous by putting a concrete wall and gateway in front of his house, and making lavish use of white paint in decorating his buildings and grounds. He succeeded, but I cannot help thinking that if he had put the money that useless concrete work cost into shrubbery and vines, it would have made his place ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... oratories in Ireland; its length was about 29 feet, its breadth 16 feet, with an arched doorway, and one little window, walled up, above the altar. The masonry was of the roughest description, the stones appearing to have been put together with little selection; and the floor was a rude kind of concrete, china clay being used instead of lime. Some skeletons were found within the church, and many more without; in fact, human remains are still cast up by the sands. Perhaps this was once a spot of thick population; or, more probably, the fame of St. Piran may have rendered it ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... extension, the less the comprehension,' and we may put the same thought in another way and say of abstract or general ideas, that the greater the abstraction of them, the less are they capable of being applied to particular and concrete natures. ...
— Meno • Plato

... we all," Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that ...
— Warm • Robert Sheckley

... Nothing in Particular 7. The Law of Balance in Life 8. The Application of the Law of Causation to Morals 9. The Retribution in the Past, the Present, and the Future Life 10. The Eternal Life as taught by Professor M?nsterberg 11. Life in the Concrete 12. Difficulties are no Match for an Optimist 13. Do Thy Best and ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... simple. Running into the mountain there was a tunnel, which they were lining with concrete, and it was the task of I and another to push cars of the stuff from the outlet to the scene of operations. My partner was a Swede who had toiled from boyhood, while I had never done a day's work in my life. It was as much as I could do to lift the loaded boxes into the car. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... blast, and he seemed to run no risks by letting the spies report to any one but himself. Fred, who slept more lightly than I did, told me afterward that the women principally brought him particulars of the workings of local politics; the men detailed news of the oncoming concrete enemy. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... there are a great many kinds of people; only that here, in Nova Scotia, the difference is in spots, not in individuals. And I will venture to say to those philanthropists who are eternally preaching "of the masses," and "to the masses," that here "masses" can be found—concrete "masses," not yet individualized: as ready to jump after a leader as a flock of sheep after a bell-wether; only that at every interval of five or ten miles between place and place in Nova Scotia, they are apt to jump in contrary directions. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... one which felt the problems and tragedies of the world deeply. He grieved for his friends, he helped the distresses he saw, but his imagination rested closely in the concrete. He was incapable of weltschmerz; even for things just beyond his personal ken he had little vision or fancy. His treatment of the perpetual problem of sex-temptations and lapses is a good example: he never seems to be conscious of the tragedy they envelop. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... the mailbox!" Whedbee walked across the street to the square green box with the rounded metal top. Another of the globes had been attached to the mailbox, and the legs had been burned loose from the concrete sidewalk. Confidently, Whedbee lifted the light object, carried it to the truck, and ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert

... had discovered close to his garden the remains of a building of Roman-British times, and thus gave my father the opportunity of seeing for himself the effects produced by earthworms' work on the old concrete-floors, walls, etc. On his return he wrote ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... time almost passionate, impatience which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency, of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to the panoramic. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... parchment, i.e. the two lobes of the bean are still covered by a parchment-like skin, and in this condition the bean is washed down into the fermenting-tanks, where it remains for thirty-six hours. After a final washing, it is dried in the sun in large wooden trays running on wheels, or else on concrete platforms. Most of the Javan coffee is sent off to Europe while it is still in the husk, in order that it may present a better appearance in the European markets. At Tji Wangi, however, the whole work of preparation was done ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... the travellers through their allegorical progress with interest not inferior to that with which we follow Elizabeth from Siberia to Moscow, or Jeanie Deans from Edinburgh to London. Bunyan is almost the only writer that ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors, men are mere personifications. We have not an Othello, but jealousy; not an Iago but perfidy; not a Brutus, but patriotism. The mind of Bunyan, on the contrary, was so imaginative, that personifications, when he dealt with them, became men. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various

... gives the total number of airports. The runway(s) may be paved (concrete or asphalt surfaces) or unpaved (grass, dirt, sand, or gravel surfaces), but must be usable. Not all airports have facilities for refueling, maintenance, or air ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... 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 or dragons were invented by combining parts ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... stayed at the Marne. Then the Allies had assumed the offensive, and driven the Germans back to the Aisne. Ypres, Hazebrouck, Estairs and Armentieres had been retaken on the Western frontier of Belgium and France. The huge Austrian siege guns, 42 centimetres, had proven too much for the antique concrete of the Belgian and French forts, but the tide of ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr. Galsworthy's Strife and Justice. The French plays, in my judgment, suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme—that is to say, the abstract element—over the human and concrete factors in the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art eludes this danger, at any rate in Strife. We do not remember until all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is, one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... must richer sap secrete, (Could ye in time but know it!) 130 Must juice concrete with fiercer heat, Ere she can make her poet; Long generations go and come, At last she bears a singer, For ages dumb of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... which was one-storeyed, was of solid masonry, the floor being well raised upon arches. Wide pillared verandahs ran on every side, and the roof was of concrete supported by iron joists. The rooms were lofty and spacious, with high doors and many windows, furnished with glass shutters and Venetian blinds; and were designed to fulfil the requirements of married officials of important position in ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... paper may be explained by a concrete example. When a barefoot boy steps on a sharp stone there is an immediate discharge of nervous energy in his effort to escape from the wounding stone. This is not a voluntary act. It is not due to his own personal experience— his ontogeny—but ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... that is the true, effective heroine of the story, as Dr. Dawson aptly points out. "Ridiculous in the lecture room, the babe in the poem, as in the songs, is made the central point upon which the plot turns, for the unconscious child is the concrete embodiment of Nature herself, clearing away all merely intellectual theories by her silent influence." This is the explanation, then, of the appearance of the babe—symbol of the power and tenderness of Nature—in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas, and putting those particular ideas together. You cannot make bricks without straw. Do not worry about literature in the abstract, about theories as to literature. Get at it. Get hold of literature in the concrete as a dog gets hold of a bone. If you ask me where you ought to begin, I shall gaze at you as I might gaze at the faithful animal if he inquired which end of the bone he ought to attack. It doesn't matter in the slightest degree where you begin. Begin ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... that striking fact which has been likened to the changing of swords in Hamlet; that the abstract minds at length yield to the inevitable or at least grow less ardent in their propaganda, while the concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily affairs, in the end demonstrate the reality ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... the instant when our expectation is most kindled toward the glory of the dawn and of the day which it foretokens. "The vanguard of his strength" in the next clause suggests the purely fanciful. This mixture of the concrete and the abstract does not go back to sensation, a thing worth noting and so the visualization is destroyed. The dependent clause brings up a new visualization, a V2, in the "dust of a small town." The second sentence ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith

... forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold his whilom hereditary foeman, but now firm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... published a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, which advocated complete political independence of England. The sledge hammer blows which he struck hastened the Declaration of Independence. Note the energy, the directness, and the employment of the concrete method in the following:— ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... evening—is the right kind of father. 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 ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... 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

... deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements—everything that the best brains of the German Army could devise for our destruction—had been lavished on the German lines. And behind the first line was a second—and behind the second line a third. And now here we stand in ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... us,—he could not well tell us, 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 of unity is the highest, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... ancient 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 ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... whole two characteristics predominate: a great intensity of feeling, which sometimes sinks into sentimentality, and at others rises into lyric fervour; and a wonderful truth, not only to the general impressions of his experience, but to the actual concrete facts of it, even to such trifles as the names of persons and places. Thus The Forefathers, despite all its fantastic elements, reproduces many incidents in which the poet himself was concerned. Furthermore, in certain works, as in his early tale Grazyna, Mickiewicz ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... the two conflicting principles, a haughty individualism and peaceable submission to a higher power, of which the concrete representative is the mass of the population, is set forth with especial clearness in "War and Peace," where the two principal heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... is no longer a god that causes and directs each of the various agencies of nature: it is a power, or a force, or an occult quality, considered as real existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in which they reside, and which they in a manner animate. Instead of Dryads presiding over trees, producing and regulating their phaenomena, every plant or animal has now a Vegetative Soul, the [Greek: Threptike phyge] of Aristotle. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... conception of the general method of scientific investigation, is that which knows nothing of observation, nothing of experiment, nothing of induction, nothing of causation! And education, the whole secret of which consists in proceeding from the easy to the difficult, the concrete to the abstract, ought to be turned the other way, and pass from the abstract to ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... that steam into New York harbor first have to pass the line of terrible guns that, back of the earth and concrete defenses, look frowningly out to sea. It ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton

... American tongues there is, in fact, no word for father, mother, brother, but only for my, your, his father, etc. This has advantages and defects. It offers marvellous facilities for defining the perceptions of the senses with the utmost accuracy, but regarding everything in the concrete, it is unfriendly to the nobler labors of the mind, to abstraction and generalization. In the numberless changes of these languages, their bewildering flexibility, their variable forms, and their rapid deterioration, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... rubbing her till we rubbed the skin off our hands, combing her hair till we went to sleep standing; but Aunt Pen had cried wolf so long, and the doctors had all declared so stoutly that there was no wolf, that our once soft hearts had become quite hard and concrete. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... tenacious old man. Probably hang on forever. God, the man had been married three times. If it wasn't for his damned infirmities he'd probably marry again. Looking for something. What was it the old man had kept looking for? As if there was in existence a concrete gift to be drawn from life. A blithering, water-eyed optimist to the end, he'd die with a prayer of thankfulness ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... and saw what, I suppose, few living Englishmen have ever seen before—the travelling Britisher according to the Continental idea, accompanied by his daughter. They were coming towards us in the flesh and blood, unless we were dreaming, alive and concrete—the English "Milor" and the English "Mees," as for generations they have been portrayed in the Continental comic press and upon the Continental stage. They were perfect in every detail. The man was tall and thin, with sandy hair, a huge nose, and long Dundreary whiskers. ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... single man, but a type; the concrete illustration of a vague ideal he had long known. He realized as the others did not, that the speaker was merely practising on them—training, as the man himself would have said. When Landers was critically conscious, he was not deceived; yet, with this knowledge, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... candidates. And yet the old world wagged on in the old way. Wages and hours and working conditions could be changed, they had learned, only by coercion. This coercion could be applied, in general reforms, only by society, by stress of public opinion. But in concrete cases, in their own personal environment, the coercion had to be first applied by themselves. They had learned the lesson of letting the world in general go its way while they attended to ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... desire to do increases the power to do; and desire and power united find new ways for the exercise of strength. Up to now Stephen's inclination towards Leonard had been vague, nebulous; but now that theory showed a way to its utilisation it forthwith began to become, first definite, then concrete, then substantial. When once the idea had become a possibility, the mere passing of time ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... intelligible than the rest, attracted both notice and praise, though it was also much blamed for what would now be called its unpleasantness. Many people, among them his wife, regretted that, having proved his ability to handle the concrete, he still should devote himself to ideal and unpopular abstractions, such as 'The Witch of Atlas' (1821), a fantastical piece in rime royal, which seems particularly to have provoked Mrs. Shelley. A "lady Witch" lived in a ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... had heard Sorensen's arguments before. Sorensen didn't mind discussing his battery in the abstract, but he was awfully close-mouthed when it came to talking about it in concrete terms. He would talk about ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)

... the book 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, the student's attention ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... scratched with difficulty. The lime used for building and cementing the walls, as shown in a part at the west end which has been lately exposed, contains oyster and other smaller sea-shells, and is as firm and hard as some forms of concrete. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... Strauss paper is seen to be one of such enormous power, and its aim appears to us so lofty, that, whatever our views may be concerning the nature of the person assailed, we are forced to conclude that, to Nietzsche at least, he was but the incarnation and concrete example of the evil and danger then threatening to overtake his country, which it was the object of ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... He would teach humanity, He does so by His own conduct to lepers. When He would discredit and expose the barbarism of the Mosaic Sabbatarian laws as interpreted by scribes and Pharisees, He does so by healing the sick and blind upon the Sabbath day. He is all for the concrete, teaching not by theory, but by example. The method is novel, and its advantages are obvious. The best conceived discourses on humility, mercy, or sympathy, might be forgotten, but no one can forget the child ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson

... himself had any real existence. He had clung to 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

... should commune with Him amidst the toils of earth. The future should be full of Him, and our hopes should be based upon no vague anticipations of a perfectibility of humanity, nor upon any dim dreams of what may lie beyond the grave; but upon the concrete fact that Jesus Christ has risen, and that Jesus Christ is glorified. Does my faith grasp the Christ that was—who died for me? Does my heart cling to the Christ who is—who lives and reigns, and with whom my life is hid in God? Do ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... by day Garrison's morality suffered. It is so easy for the well-fed to be honest. But when there is the hunger cancer gnawing at one's vitals, not for one day, but for many, then honesty and dishonesty cease to be concrete realities. It is not a question of piling up luxuries, but of supplying ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... for the more personal, more concrete aspects of "God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind—an Individualist so hard, so positive, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... 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

... fondness for mechanics, and one at least of his inventions, the "Pierpont or Doric Stove," was a bit of concrete philosophy,—a miniature temple glowing with perpetual fire,—a cast-iron syllogism of itself, so classically just in its proportions, and so eminently characteristic, as to be a type of the author. He had been led through a long course of experiment in the structure of grates and stoves, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... out through the old rotten trestle of the scenic railway. That thing crossed our path like a big, long, wriggling snake. Some of the old booths were boarded up and some of them were all falling to pieces. The concrete basin that used to be a swimming pool was all full of rubbish. And the little platform away way up, that the man used to do the dive of death from, was all falling to pieces. Some places we had to climb over the old ramshackle ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... of architects have caught it. Without slavish adherence to any style, without copying anything, they are creating, expressing, even as did the Franciscan padres, beautiful thoughts in stone, brick, wood and reinforced concrete. In my magnum opus on Mission Architecture, which has long been in preparation, I hope clearly to present not only the full details of what the padres accomplished, but what these later creative artists, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... from what it means when put in any other way. Because it is perfect. You can jumble it all up, and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it was before. It was a marvellous mind that produced it. As a mental tour de force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... I 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 of early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of mind, which ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... finally edged her Renault up on the "on" ramp and the freeway stretched straight and unobstructed ahead, she stepped down on the accelerator and watched the needle climb up and past the legal 65-mile limit. The sound of her tires on the smooth concrete was soothing and the rush of wind outside gave the morning an illusion of coolness. She edged away from the tangle of cars that had pulled onto the freeway with her and momentarily was alone on the road, with her rear-view mirror blank, the oncoming ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant

... minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager, concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and moved the chair a little forward ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... this point, when his resentment was at its height, that Adair, the concrete representative of everything Sedleighan, entered ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... woman loves concrete applications. She is your only true pragmatist. If a philosophy will not work, says she, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... is, indeed, just the capacity to see meaning, to emphasize something for the sake of other things which do not appear. In brain terms it indicates an activity of the higher centers, a sort of side-tracking or long-circuiting of the primitive energy; ... Rosetti's poem, 'The Woodspurge,' gives a concrete example of the formation of such a symbol. Here the otherwise insignificant presentation of the three-cupped woodspurge, representing originally a mere side-current of the stream of consciousness, becomes the intellectual symbol ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... give it her. She could not cope with him. It made him ashamed. So, secretly ashamed because he was in such a mess, because his own hold on life was so unsure, because nobody held him, feeling unsubstantial, shadowy, as if he did not count for much in this concrete world, he drew himself together smaller and smaller. He did not want to die; he would not give in. But he was not afraid of death. If nobody would help, he would ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... Clayton is five miles inland from Clayton-on-Sea, that new and popular resort hardened with asphalt and concrete, to which city folk retire for a change in the summer. During the winter months many of the shops of the big town are closed till summer brings the holiday-makers again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fill with ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... 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 ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... life is the story of her achievement. The growth of an artist is an intellectual and spiritual development which can scarcely be followed in a personal narrative. This story attempts to deal only with the simple and concrete beginnings which color and accent an artist's work, and to give some account of how a Moonstone girl found her way out of a vague, easy-going world into a life of disciplined endeavor. Any account of the loyalty of young hearts to some exalted ideal, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... head against a narrow, outward swinging window, seized it thankfully, and plunged through it. Hanging a moment by her grimy hands she swayed, a little fearfully, then dropped with a quick breath to the concrete floor beneath, and smiled with relief as the comparative brightness of a well kept cellar revealed her safety. Vegetable bins, a neat pile of kindling wood, a large portable closet of wire netting, with occasional plates ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... consists of a large main building built in the Swiss chalet style and numerous bungalows set amid a gorgeous garden of old-fashioned flowers. Every bedroom has a bath—but such a bath!—a damp, gloomy, cement-lined cell having in one corner a concrete cistern, filled with ice-cold mountain water. The only furniture is a tin dipper. And it takes real courage, let me tell you, to ladle that icy water over your shivering person in the chill of a ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... over a hundred yards of breadth immediately in front of me, determined not to have my attention diverted to other parts of the attack and to make the most of this unique opportunity of observation in the concrete. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... 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

... think I said—didn't I? that if you insisted upon following these spiritual exercises, the result might be that they would return upon you in some concrete shape, and take possession of you, and lead you into company and surroundings which most of us think ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... been done about Wagner, and I would not add my quota did I not hope that this small contribution would save complicated explanations, now that I come to deal with the concrete, so to say, with the very stuff of Tristan, the words and the music. We are to be prepared for a drama of human passion in sharpest conflict with a dispassionate, indifferent, even antagonistic world. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... not been made. After all, the attitude of the surety companies was only a reflection of the general feeling of practical business and railroad men towards the whole venture. To the companies the proposition had come as a concrete business proffer and they ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... Judaism, 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. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... the commons. Parliament. Hist vol. v. p. 221. The king himself after all his magnificent boasts, was obliged to make his escape through a distinction which he framed between a king in abstracto and a king in concreto: an abstract king, he said, had all power; but a concrete king was bound to observe the laws of the country which he governed. King James's Works, p. 533. But how bound? by conscience only? or might his subjects resist him, and defend their privileges? This he thought not fit to explain. And so difficult is it ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... then widened into a deepish semicircular excavation. In the middle of this was a great lump of something which, as they came nearer, resolved itself into a gun of some sort. It was very thick, very short, it stood on a concrete platform, and its squat muzzle pointed almost ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges

... however, by its absolute emptiness of content, does not afford any means in itself of progression; somehow and somewhere a principle of movement, of development, of concrete reality, must be found or assumed, to link this ultimate abstraction of existence to the multifarious phenomena {12} of existence as known. And it was, perhaps, because Anaximander failed to work out this aspect ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... he means by that," Bonamy sighed. For as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... has seemed well to divide the following list into two parts—the first devoted to the discussion of theory, the other offering concrete suggestions. ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt

... bearing family problems. Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... Hansom drove 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 ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli



Words linked to "Concrete" :   objective, concreteness, concrete mixer, building material, concrete representation, practical, cement, existent, cover, ferroconcrete, touchable, tangible



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