"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breach in the concrete and the besiegers charged through, carrying back the defenders who sought vainly to plug the gap. Soon there would be rioting in the streets again, plundering ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... that the pool be gradually enlarged to make a swimming pool. He enlisted Mr. Wolf's aid for the summer evenings and in a couple of weeks a very creditable pool, brick and concrete lined, made a summer heaven of the back ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... abstract, your ideas are worth while," said Debby. She could not laugh at the matter as Miss Richards was doing. "But in the concrete, they are wrong from beginning to end, and cannot be applied to Hester's case. Hester must never marry. Knowing that, I intend to keep her from falling in love, for I would ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... was almost entirely unnoticed at the time. This play, being more 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 cave on Mount Atlas, and her games in a magic boat, her dances ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... the ride we received concrete proof of how desperate was the situation. To the right of us we heard cries and rifle-shots. Bullets whistled dangerously near. There was a crashing in the underbrush; then a magnificent black truck-horse broke across the road in front of us and was ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... tones, and the design will take care of itself. He hated "literary" painting and art criticism. He strongly advised Bernard to stick to his paint and let the pen alone. The moment an artist begins to explain his work he is done for; painting is concrete, literature deals with the abstract. He loved music, especially Wagner's, which he did not understand, but the sound of Wagner's name was sympathetic, and that had at first attracted him! Pissarro he admired for his indefatigable labours. Suffering from diabetes, which ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... paused in her work, slop-basin in hand. The concrete details were beginning to take hold of ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... arm and Rectus by the collar, and hurried us to the stairway, and then down as fast as we could go. He made no noise himself, but Rectus and I clumped a good deal. We had to wear our shoes, for the place was paved with rough concrete and oyster-shells. ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... he turned and strode down the hillside to the dam site in the canyon. The time had come to shut his hand about the work and let his hold be felt. He located the superintendent directing the pouring of concrete in the frames of the dam core, Atkinson, a man of fifty with a stubby gray mustache, a wind-bitten face and a tall angular frame. When Weir joined him he was observing with speculative eyes the indolent movements of a group ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... however, exceeds in interest the discovery, in 1833, of a bath and tesselated pavement behind the Deanery walls in South Street. The walls were of Heavitree stone and brick, and the original pavement was of black-and-white tesserae set in concrete. The associated remains of a thirteenth-century encaustic-tile pavement indicates the use of the old Roman bath a thousand years or so after it had been made. Several other tesselated pavements are recorded ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... production seems to have a specially attractive fragrance to many animals, and for general use is much esteemed by trappers. It is a vegetable drug from Persia and the East Indies, and is imported in the form of concrete ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... particular time, nor some even more intimate matter— there seems no harm done. And yet the most important points have often been blabbed of in just such a way. And what is worst of all, just because the speaker has not known the name nor anything else concrete, the issue may be diverted and enmesh some guiltless person. It is worth considering that the effort above mentioned is made only in the most interesting cases, that crimes especially move people to disgusting interest, due to the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... could not help thinking of Capes. Surely Capes was different. Capes looked at one and not over one, spoke to one, treated one as a visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her, cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little things, almost impalpable, had happened ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... bed on the roof of his hermitage. I had often dreamed of the enjoyment of a life in the woods all by one's self, but such a mode of existence did not gain in attractiveness as I saw it here in the concrete example. On the whole I was well satisfied to sleep in the hotel and eat at the hotel table. Liberty is good, but I thought it might be undesirable to be a slave ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... brought about since that memorable day is almost unbelievable. The whole country has been revolutionized. Railroads and macadamized roads have been built with steel and concrete bridges and where it used to be almost impassable it is now a pleasure to travel. Schools and colleges have been established. A bureau of labor has averted many strikes. A constabulary force of nearly five thousand men has done wonders in suppressing brigandage, bringing the ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... concrete amusement for the public always imagine ourselves much better known to that public than we are, Miss West. It's our little vanity—rather harmless after all. We're a pretty decent lot, sometimes absurd, especially in our tragic moments; sometimes emotional, usually illogical, often impulsive, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... dense, compact, hard, impenetrable, firm, unyielding, imporous, concrete, substantial; unanimous, united, undivided. Antonyms: porous, incompact, hollow, spongy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... quantity was intended for exportation; but she also, taking some strips of cotton, dipped them into the mass, and produced some apologies for candles. The flame was not bright; but the vegetable tallow has the advantage of remaining concrete, or hard, under the greatest tropical heat, white that produced from animal fat becomes too soft for the purpose. When she had no household work to give me, I was sent out with a number of other slaves, both black and brown, to cut wood for firing or building purposes, and to collect ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... wedged into the foundations, and slope inwards and upwards to within a few feet of the height to which it is intended to carry the digue. On the top another solid bed of branches is laid down, and the whole is first covered with concrete, and then with bricks or tiles, while the edge of the digue, at the top of the seaward slope, is composed of heavy blocks of stone cemented together and bound by ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... disgust had seized upon him in Sunset, it had been an abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it. This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond any emotion he had ever ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hospitiis. Immigrants and visitors. Adventibus certae sedes, hospitiis preregrinationes significantur. Guen. Both abstract for concrete. Doed. compares ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... ground of our present abbreviations y'e the, y't that, y's this, &c. the y in these cases being evidently only an altered and more modern way of writing . [5] vyaund. This word is to be understood in the concrete, quasi vyander, a curious epicure, an Apicius. V. Preface. [6] csten ynges. Christian kings. K being to be inserted afterwards (v. note [1] and [3]) in red ink. Chaucer, v. christen. [7] and. Read of. [8] Phisik. V. Preface. [9] Sotiltees. Devices ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... 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, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the story of evolution in strict connection with the geological record. We shall find that the record will continue to throw light on our path to the end, but, as we are now about to approach the most important era of evolution, and as we have now seen so much of the concrete story of evolution, it will be interesting to examine briefly some other ways of conceiving ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... passion for pink-scented notes and a correspondence full of madrigals and sparkling wit was declared to be the last phase of the tender passion; love had reached the Doctrinaire stage; or had passed, in other words, from the concrete to the abstract. The illustrious lady, so cruelly ridiculed under the name of Octavie by Beranger, had conceived (so it was said) the gravest fears. The correspondence was languishing. The more Octavie displayed her wit, the cooler grew the royal ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the whole, is worthy of its subject. It is written with warmth, subtlety, and considerable humour. Smiles and thoughts lie hidden within many of its pregnant lines. One of the biographer's very strangest suggestions is never made concrete at all, so far as I can discern. The figure of the literary discoverer of the South Seas emerges perhaps a bit vaguely, his head in the clouds, but there is no reason to believe that Melville's head was anywhere else when he was alive. Hawthorne is at last described pretty ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... against the rail, buried deep in thought, Billy Byrne passed close behind her. At sight of her a sneer curled his lip. How he hated her! Not that she ever had done aught to harm him, but rather because she represented to him in concrete form all that he had learned to hate and loathe since ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Logic. Is Logic not concerned at all with meaning, is it only juggling with empty forms of words? Lastly, if from all this there springs up a conviction of 'The Bankruptcy of Intellectualism,' the question suggests itself whether the relation between abstract thinking and concrete experience, between 'Thought' and 'Life,' has been rightly grasped. Is life worth living only for the sake of philosophic contemplation, or is thinking only worth doing to aid us in the struggle for life? Are 'theory' and 'practice' two separate kingdoms with rigid frontiers, strictly guarded, ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... refer to his life needs in any practical way. This tendency is illustrated in the desire of some teachers to substitute with young children a technical study of botany and zoology, in place of more concrete work in nature study. Now when the child approaches these phases of his surroundings in the form of nature study, he is able to see their influence upon his own community life. When, on the other hand, these are introduced to him in too technical ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... editorial in The Sentinel, our weekly paper, says, in part: "We who are here in North Russia constitute concrete evidence that there is something real and vital behind the words of President Wilson and other allied statesmen who have pledged that 'we shall stand by Russia.' Few of us, particularly few Americans, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... of a natural concrete called culeche. The external walls are rough, but are smoothly plastered within, showing the marks of human hands. Two pairs of small holes in the walls opposite others in the central room have occasioned much speculation. Two look east and west; the others, also on opposite walls, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... head five thousand feet above the palace, the highest thing in the city. They blasted down the huge steel doors, cut the power from the energy-screens. They landed from antigrav-cars on the upper levels. But except for barriers of metal and concrete and energy, they met with no opposition. Finally, they came to the spiral stairway which led up to the great metal sphere which capped ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... inches deep and filled with boulders rammed in with clay. On this a wood fire was built, and the clay burned hard, resting on this around the edges a form of boards was placed, making a sort of bottomless box. The cement, mixed with sand and water from the creek, was made into a concrete which was poured into the form upon the baked clay and boulders. The plastic mass when it filled the boxlike structure to the top was smoothed off and allowed to dry. Forty-eight hours after it had hardened into stone and ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... was beginning to affect me. She was quite unable to tell me what she had seen, but her whole manner expressed a dazed horror, not so much of some concrete fear as of the ghastly position in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Sakes! but it did torment a body so! It was kep' by a Chink, and the star play in the window was a kind of two-story cake with frostin' all over the place—on top and down the sides, and on the bottom fur all I knew, it looked that rich. And it had cocoanut mixed in with it. Say, now, that concrete looked fit to pave the streets of the New Jerusalem with—and a hunk was cut out, jest like I'd always dream of so much—showin' a cross-section of rich yellow cake and a fruity-lookin' fillin' that jest made a man want to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... with an hotel from which a free 'bus runs to a station upon the line of an excellent railway. Maisonneuve fought his great fight upon a place from which a vicious mayor cut the trees which once sheltered the soldier, to make way for a fountain upon which would be raised "historical" figures in concrete stone. ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... living procession, of inspired human experiences. It is to an extraordinary degree human, dealing all along with names as familiar to us as any in any history can be; with characters which are perfectly individual; with lives lived in the face of difficulty, danger, trial, sorrow, as concrete as possible; with deaths met and overcome under conditions of mystery, suspense, trial to courage and to trust, which for all time the heart of man can apprehend in their solemnity. Meanwhile, as a matter of diction and eloquence, the chapter ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... scientific study had been stimulated by the coming of French and Spanish scholars to measure a degree of the earth's surface at the equator. The coming of Humboldt in 1801 still further encouraged inquiry and research. The new spirit was given concrete expression by Dr. Francisco Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, a physician of native descent, in page 298 El nuevo Luciano, a work famous in the literary and the political history of South America. In this work Dr. Espejo attacked the prevailing ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... concrete forms, they can more easily keep before their minds. They regard favourable omens as given for their encouragement, and bad omens as friendly warnings.[134] We were told by one very intelligent Kenyah ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush and the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church of St. Peter, the most concrete "expression" of the glories of the triumphant church. And so ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... grew from a distant mumble to a shrieking roar, and the next thing, each man had landed upon the concrete-and-paint bull's-eye before ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... The huge concrete piers which they had noticed were not piers at all, but the ruined foundations of buildings. They had been baked by the searing heat, baked and charred almost to the ground. Nothing else remained, only this ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick
... which demanded embodiment, and hence was inherently artistic. Still the Greek mind created a Hades, and finally went over into the pure Idea in Plato and the philosophers. Even Homer seems to feel that philosophy is at last a needful discipline, that the abstract thought must be taken from its concrete wrappage, that the Universal must ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... week. Accordingly, it was arranged that I should retire gracefully and recommend my official successor to my American friends in a short speech. This I did with perfect good-will. But the Foreign Office, though they did not reckon without their host, had reckoned without his guests. When the concrete proposal (well-meant, I am sure) was made in all its glorious navet in a little speech by the new host, it was received with something like annoyance—a fact which worried me not a little, for I had, rather unwisely perhaps, assured my official mentors ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 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 himself. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... was to overlook the men as they lazily dug out the concrete-like sand and shingle at the bottom of the trench, filling baskets with the debris below which their fellows above hoisted up none the more energetically; and the first-mate could not help noticing that while Jan Steenbock purred them on now and then for a brief spell, he let them, as a rule, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... moral motive. The stories are short and naturally slight; some, indeed, incline rather to the essay than to the story, but each has that enthralling interest which justifies its existence. Coppee possesses preeminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction. A sketch, for instance, is the first tale written by him, 'Une Idylle pendant le Seige' (1875). In a novel we require strong characterization, great grasp of character, and the novelist should show us the human heart ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... himself, even in wickedness. Come now: either take your hat and go; or else sit down and give me a good scoundrelly reason for wanting to be friends with me. (Burgess, whose emotions have subsided sufficiently to be expressed by a dazed grin, is relieved by this concrete proposition. He ponders it for a moment, and then, slowly and very modestly, sits down in the chair Morell has just left.) That's right. ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... hundred pounds, and one hundred and eighty pounds respectively. The windlass and the forty-pound anchor, and the "fiddle-head," or carving, on the end of the cutwater, belonged to the original Spray. The ballast, concrete cement, was stanchioned down securely. There was no iron or lead or other weight ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... to the Egyptian was to secure the favour of the god. There is but little trace of negative prayer to avert evils or deprecate evil influences, but rather of positive prayer for concrete favours. On the part of kings this is usually of the Jacob type, offering to provide temples and services to the god in return for material prosperity. The Egyptian was essentially self-satisfied, he had ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... 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 River and I • John G. Neihardt
... 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 ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... unifies the landscape of the whole town and puts all the community centers where they belong. The Town and Settlement straggled a bit before, but the chapel and the school will unite them! Braid says the schoolhouse can be built of weathered stone and concrete and finished by September fifth, in time to start school. Wilkerson can begin immediately putting out his hedges and the Reverend Gregory is down there now finishing laying out the playground ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... syllogism runs thus: criminality is incompatible with true civilization—with a normal and secure society. Jails are a crime; society makes and warrants jails; therefore society is criminal. And the abolition of jails—repudiation both of the principle and of the concrete fact—is the only way to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... student will perhaps find the necessary condition expressed by the statement that "the number of independent equations must equal the number of unknown quantities." Now this statement makes little or no concrete impression upon the minds of most students. They do not understand exactly what it means, and they can easily be trapped into misapplying it. To study it, the student should ask himself what each word ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... of phrasing is comparatively simple because here the composer has, in general, adapted the melody to the phrasing of the text; and since in language we have definite ideas and concrete imagery to assist us, all that we usually need to do in studying the phrasing of vocal music is to follow carefully the phrasing of the text. But even then a warning ought perhaps to be given the young conductor regarding carelessness or ignorance on the part of singers about some of the most fundamental ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished, the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply. The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant; the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... due respect to the sincerity of this conviction the more because I wish to lay before you some grounds for questioning its ultimate validity. It is no problem of abstract politics or ethics with which I here confront your minds, but one of concrete and immediate urgency. Distinctively economic in its substance, it brings right into the daylight the hitherto obscure issue of the duty of nations as members of an actual or potential society of nations. As a result of the destruction of war a large part of Europe lies today in economic ruin. By ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... with two large barred windows, overlooking the prisoners' exercise yard, where men, in yellow clothes marked with arrows, and yellow brimless caps, are seen in single file at a distance of four yards from each other, walking rapidly on serpentine white lines marked on the concrete floor of the yard. Two warders in blue uniforms, with peaked caps and swords, are stationed amongst them. The room has distempered walls, a bookcase with numerous official-looking books, a cupboard between the windows, a plan of the prison on the wall, a writing-table ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 had such feelings towards the rest of the world as to be willing to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... what had been done to the sky. When the train did not sneak between hills of slag, cinders, rubbish, garbage, dross and the bloody brown carrion of broken machinery, it shot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbroken barriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaring tunnels full of grimy light ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... to read a character like Butler's "A Flatterer" to appreciate Gally's point. The Theophrastan method had been to describe a character operatively—that is, through the use of concrete dramatic incident illustrating the particular vice. The seventeenth-century character is too often merely a showcase for the writer's wit. One frequently finds a succession of ingenious metaphors, each redefining from a slightly different angle a type's master-passion, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... might be said that an idea, the big idea, danced unceremoniously into his brain, and, beginning to take definite and concrete form, chased a score of other smaller ideas through all the thought-channels of his handsome, boyish, ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... reason at all for disturbance. "Young Westcott had better not come meddling here," they muttered darkly, having discerned already a tendency on his part to show disapproval. Nothing happened during the first term—no concrete incident—but Peter had stepped, by the end of it, from an exultant popularity to an actual distrust and suspicion. The football season had not been very successful and Peter had not the graces and charm of a leader. He distrusted the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... more upon the public mind, laws were enacted and grants made to further in every way so desirable an object. Hence, what was a crude and inadequate school organization prior to 1830, at that time and afterwards began to assume a more concrete shape, and continued to improve until it has grown into a system of which the country ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... if not materially yet in thought, and recognised then, that all the qualities of matter, the sounds, the colours, the scents—all that depends upon material vibration—were abstracted from it; while form, of which the idea exists in the mind apart from all concrete manifestations, was still present. For some time after that, a series of these crystalline globes passed through the atmosphere where I dwelt, some near, some far; and I saw in an instant, in each case, the life and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... point, when his resentment was at its height, that Adair, the concrete representative of everything ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 and imaginations, as it were by suggestion; reaching for this ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... done. All the broad lines of its social organisation are completed now, the discussion of all its general difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, fine buildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that I may look too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete and individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of realisation, but the swimming moment of opacity before the film gives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is to return to ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... her knees again, and instantly, after the sublime fashion of her sex, scattered his intellect by a swift transition from the abstract to the concrete. "But you're not a butterfly, Mr. Jeff. You're always doing something. ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... undoubtedly, some principles of universal application; and the old critics often expounded them with admirable common-sense and force. But like general tenets of morality, they are apt to be commonplaces, whose specific application requires knowledge of concrete facts. When the critics assumed that the forms familiar to themselves were the only possible embodiments of those principles, and condemned all others as barbarous, they were led to pass judgments, such, for example, as Voltaire's view of Dante and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... in some of our oldest navy yards. The employes have many of them grown old in the service of the firm; and well paid, intelligent, and satisfied, are themselves the owners of their attractive cottage homes and take a just pride in the welfare of the community. The concrete walks, macadamized roadways, and well kept yards and lawns evince thrift. The elegant railway station, a gift to the village from one member of the family, is a model of architectural beauty and convenience. The Gothic church and ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... library there to enrich his baths. The ruins of the library in the Baths of Caracalla reveal circular tiers of galleries for the display of manuscripts and papyri. There were 500 rooms round these baths. The great hall had a ceiling made in one span, and the roof was an early example of reinforced concrete, for it was made of concrete in which bronze bars were laid. The lead for the water-pipes was probably brought ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... move most men are the small, concrete, individual experiences of life. The death of a child is of more account to its parents than the fall of a republic. Napoleon did not forget Josephine in his Italian campaigns, and Grant, inflexible commander ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... misunderstood in the way in which they have been misunderstood by both the vernacular translators. Indeed, K.P. Singha blunders ridiculously, while the Burdwan translator limits them to only the use of food, supposing the commentator's concrete examples exhaust the meaning. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... worshipped the true God, albeit in ignorance. At the same time, though idolatry is in numberless instances nothing more than the use of media and mediators, in seeking the One, Invisible, Absolute Spirit, it is so naturally abused by sensuous beings who rest in the concrete, that no image worshipper is free from the propensity to worship the creature more than the Creator, and to forget the Essence in familiarity with the form. The perfection of worship, we conceive, is pure theism; but how few are capable of breathing in such a supersensuous air! Men ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the skating ballet was due to Meyerbeer. At the time there was an amusing fellow in Paris who had invented roller skates and who used to practise his favorite sport on fine evenings on the large concrete surfaces of the Place de la Concorde. Meyerbeer saw him and got the idea of the famous ballet. In the early days of the opera it certainly was charming to see the skaters come on accompanied by a pretty chorus and a rhythm from ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... planing mill, 2 private schools, 3 cobblers' establishments, 2 livery stables, 3 blacksmith shops, 2 furniture houses, 2 undertaking establishments, 2 grain elevators, a lime quarry, 3 wheelwright shops, 2 tinning establishments, a concrete construction plant, monument works, wood and coal yard, Standard Oil Company's branch and ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr. Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and declasse and really knew something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper, silent and diligent ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 of the question, that in the subsequent ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... names to her. They called up no concrete visions of the baking, siroccolike winds that curdled the grain in the milk, the hail that threshed it and beat it flat, of the late frosts that nipped the tender green shoots in spring, and the early ones in fall that soured the kernels before the complete ripening. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If Marino ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... man admires nobility and intelligence in a woman; but in the concrete he always prefers a bird of Paradise to a wren, a decoration to an inspiration ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... on the value of women in criminal investigation; their skill as detective agents... the suitability of the feminine intelligence to the hard, accurate labor of concrete deductions. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... individual soon wearied of expiring patriots, who all appeared to be quitting their earthly tabernacles in convulsions, ruffled shirts, and a whirl of torn banners, bomb shells, and buff and blue arms and legs. The statuary also was massive and concrete, but rather wearying to examine; for the colossal ladies and gentlemen, carried no cards of introduction in face or figure; so, whether the meditative party in a kilt, with well-developed legs, shoes like army slippers, and a ponderous nose, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... selected, well burnt, well glazed, and free from twist. Too much care cannot be exercised in properly laying them. The trenches should be got out to proper falls, and unless the ground is hard and firm, the pipes should be laid upon a layer of concrete to prevent the chance of sinking. The jointing must be carefully made, and should be of cement or of well tempered clay, care being taken to wipe away all projecting portions from the inside of the pipes. A clear passage-way is of the utmost importance. Foul drains are the result of badly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... forth, And the gentleman somehow slunk out of the way, But, as he was going, gained courage to say,— 'At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to 't as any one else.' 1150 'Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,' Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, 'The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss Is only in taking a great busy nation For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.— But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully. Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a matter of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... disposal, as found in the patristic writings and legendary records; and various theories have been put forward, not the least astonishing being the supposition that Simon was an alias for Paul, and that the Simon and Peter in the accounts of the fathers and in the narrative of the legends were simply concrete symbols to represent the two sides of ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... fell from his seat and rolled upon the floor, and the House laughed itself almost into hysteria, whilst the hapless orator stood waving in apologetic dumb show. Now here was a tragedy indeed: to have the dream of a whole lifetime at last actually realised and concrete and then to see it go to ruin in that way. So swift a transition from the very height of triumph to the very gulf! When our laugh was over I am sure there was not one of us who did not profoundly sympathise with the sufferer, and Mr Newdigate ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... the Beautiful in the abstract—the Beautiful in all its manifestations which include Justice, Harmony, Truth, and Kindliness—the one indispensable element of his physical happiness, the Beautiful in the concrete. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Three concrete domes crouched on the valley floor, housing barracks, tool-shops, kitchens, store-houses, and executive quarters, connected by underground passages. Beside the smallest dome, joined to it by a heavily barred tunnel, was an insulated ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... were a discoverer, he invariably shrank from its subsequent application the moment that he found it might be unpopular and inconvenient. All his quandaries terminated in the same catastrophe; a compromise. Abstract principles with him ever ended in concrete expediency. The aggregate of circumstances outweighed the isolated cause. The primordial tenet, which had been advocated with uncompromising arrogance, gently subsided into some second-rate measure recommended with all the artifice ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... theoretically, we should have no difficulty in deciding this question. We are dealing with the sequelae of some definite situation, and the removal of that situation may be, and actually is, in most instances, sufficient to bring about recovery. When we come, however, to deal with concrete instances in daily practice, the problem does not lend itself so ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader conceptions proceeded ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... sketch of the nocturnal funeral train, proved vain. Each one's fancy silently carried out the picture further; they saw the body itself on the stretcher; the bier was depicted with distinctness as if it were a concrete token of the mysterious deed; a carpenter even drew it in chalk in bold strokes on the wall of the court-house. A woman who suffered from insomnia stated that she was sitting at the window that night ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than grapple with hideous concrete problems—this has been the tendency of the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of man,—all perfectly synonymous expressions,—such is the common object of political economy and philosophy. To determine the laws of the production and distribution of wealth will be to demonstrate, by an objective and concrete exposition, the laws of reason and liberty; it will be to create philosophy and right a posteriori: whichever way we turn, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 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 ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... previous night. Yes; he had not imposed on her for a moment; and she perceived clearly now that murder had been in his heart. She was not appalled nor desolated. She thought: 'So that is murder, that little thing, that thing over in a minute!' It appeared to her that murder in the concrete was less dreadful than murder in the abstract, far less horrible than the strident sound of the word on the lips of a newsboy, or the look of it in the 'Signal.' She felt dimly that she ought to be shocked, unnerved, terrified, at the prospect of living, eating, and sleeping with a ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... might be made of concrete evidences of the natural antipathy that the present German autocracy has for successful democracy and hence for us. A new instance has just come to me. My son, Arthur, who succeeded to most of my activities at home, has ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... aware that the company had risen, we rose also, and donning hats and coats, set forth, talking still. Together we paced beside docks and along piers that stretched away by the mile, massive structures of granite and concrete, which had only come into being, so he ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... can afford to build a house merely for its artistic qualities. Yet we feel that we owe it to our neighbors and to the community to make the house sightly. Most of all, we owe it to ourselves, for the product of our plans will be the concrete expression of our personality. Fortunately showiness is neither necessary nor desirable; while artistic qualities are not so much a matter of money as of thought. A few days ago, in a suburb of a Western city, I passed two houses recently constructed. One was simply an enlarged ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... memory drifted backward. For since the day I had met Jack Osborne at Brooks's on his return from Nigeria, many incidents had occurred which puzzled me. Trifling incidents individually, no doubt, yet significant when considered in the concrete. There was the incident, for instance, of Sir Harry Dawson's declaring in a letter written to Lord Easterton from the Riviera that he had never met Gastrell, never heard of him even, though Lord Easterton ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... finest on the islands; and owing to the slow maturity of the cane at so great a height, the yield is from five to six tons an acre. Water is very scarce; all that is used in the boiling- house and elsewhere has been carefully led into concrete tanks for storage, and even the walks in the proprietor's beautiful garden are laid with cement for the same purpose. He has planted many thousand Australian eucalyptus trees on the hillside in the hope of procuring a larger rainfall, so that the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... to me, the ace of spades ghoulishly visible, its ominousness tempered only by the word "Bicycle" printed across it. "Don't hold out on your Uncle Jacson or I might have the boys take you for a little trip. A block of concrete tastefully inscribed 'A Weener' ought to make an amusing base ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... scholastic tournaments the two champions started from opposite points—one, from the ultimate substance, God—the universal, the ideal, the type—the other from the individual, Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object of sensual perception. The first champion—William in this instance— assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he was called a realist. His opponent—Abelard—held that the universal was only nominally real; and on that account ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... told it to others, too. But, now, the younger set, en masse and in detail, had become a little bit cramponne—a trifle too all-pervading. And it was because his regard for them, in the abstract, had become centred in a single concrete example that he began to find the younger set a nuisance. But others, it seemed, were quite as mad about Eileen Erroll as he was; and there seemed to be small chance for him to possess himself of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... combination, by which Indian lexicography is rendered so graphic and descriptive in the bestowal of names. They are all, or nearly all, transpositive and polysynthetic; yet although now found in a very concrete form, this appears to have been not their original form, but rather the result of the progress of syllabical accretion, from a few limited roots and particles, which are yet when dissected found to be monosyllabic. That they have incorporated ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... which our ancestors (I wonder that I was allowed any ancestors: why wasn't I created at once out of some stray scrap of protoplasm?) were supposed to have held in the colonial period. As I gazed upon Washington Flagg I thrilled with the sense that I was gazing upon the materialization in a concrete form of all the ghostly brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces which ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... puts into concrete form, with expert simplicity, the secrets of writing photoplays which appeal to the millions of Americans who attend the theatres and the producers can not buy enough of such plays to satisfy the exhibitors." (Signed) Robert Lee Macnabb, National Vice-President, Motion Picture ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... which emerges from a perfectly harmonious distribution of parts, embellished by surface decoration only when the limbs and members of the building demand emphasis, may be sought for everywhere in vain. The substratum is a box, a barn, an inverted bottle; built up of rubble, brick, and concrete; clothed with learned details, which have been borrowed from the pseudo-science of the humanist. There is nothing here of divine Greek candour, of dominant Roman vigour, of Gothic vitality, of fanciful invention governed by a sincere ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... government, the end of which, like that of all governments, is the good of mankind; and the possession of as much freedom by each State, as is consistent with the attainment of that end. But there is this difference: that the government thus set up over nations is ideal, and has no concrete representative of the sovereign power; whence the only way of settling any dispute finally is to fight it out. Thus the supra-national society is continually in danger of returning to the state of nature, in which contracts are void; and the possibility ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... write, in the fall of 1921, the walls of a new fine concrete home for the children are under construction at St. Anthony, to be used in conjunction with the original wooden building which is crowded to capacity. Children of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain giving ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... that all mad delusions are as concrete as this, though some are more concrete. Believing your own body is glass is a more daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the top of a pole. But all true delusions have in them this unalterable assertion—that ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... The visible concrete symbols and observances of religion have great influence with them. They are fond of making vows in tight places and faithfully observing them afterwards. In an hour's walk in the streets of Madrid you will see a dozen ladies with a leather strap buckled about their slender waists and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... founded on the statement of their common poverty in abstract expressions, is not just to either. This paper will be written in vain if it shall not suggest the capacities of gesture speech in that regard, and a deeper study into Indian tongues has shown that they are by no means so confined to the concrete ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... 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, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... water on them. And as it draws near to its end the thought of my book grows more and more dear to me. How I will get it published I know not; but I will. Then even if it doesn't sell, even if nobody reads it, I will be content. Out of this brief, perishable Me I will have made something concrete, something that will preserve my thought within its dusty covers long after I am ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... previously, such exhaustive scientific training naturally tends to make the mind mathematical. It cannot be satisfied unless its surroundings—the substantial realisation of the concrete-are perfect. So Mr. Phillip had a suit for every purpose—for football, cricket, tennis, bicycle, shooting, dining, and strolling about. In the same way he possessed a perfect armoury of athletic and other useful implements. There were fine bats by the best makers for cricket, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... 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, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... and be ready, at the slightest provocation, to attack any foreign Power. In fact, however, the sending of the Great Fleet, which was wholly his project, was designed by him to strengthen the prospect of peace for the United States. Through it, he gave a concrete illustration of his maxim: "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." The Panama Canal was then half dug and would be finished in a few years. Distant nations thought of this country as of a land peopled by dollar-chasers, too absorbed ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... more water was needed to supply the rapidly increasing acreage of cultivated lands, Willard Holmes came to appreciate the desert-bred surveyor's view of the danger and insistently urged his employers to supply him with funds to replace the temporary wooden structures with safe and lasting works of concrete and steel. ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... reported that the island was covered at high tides, and was unfit to bear the foundations of even the slightest buildings. Piles are being driven in, as close as they will stand, over every foot of ground in it. Over this a coating of concrete many feet thick will be laid, and on this the fortress, which is to be the centre and heart of Russia, will rise. In the fort will stand a pile, which will be the tomb of the future czars of Russia, and there in front of us, where you see fifty thousand peasants at work, shall ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... perhaps—though inconvenient, would not have weighed appreciably in the scale were he the only one affected. But though he was pursuing his course along the path of investigation eagerly and doing good work without a shadow of disappointment, he was aware not merely that he had not as yet made a concrete valuable discovery, but might never do so. This possibility did not appall him, but he recognized that it was a part of the circumstances of his particular case viewed from the standpoint of a contemplative judgment on his behavior. He was succeeding, ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... alterations,—rectifications, by the Prussian model and new rule now introduced. Of which, as it is better that the reader have some dim notion, if easily procurable, than none at all, I will offer him one example;—itself dim enough, but coming at first-hand, in the actual or concrete form, and beyond disputing in whatever light or twilight ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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, a well built frame lasting for years—forever, if you want to take a little more time and make it of concrete ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... ultra. This mysterious fragment is one of the most original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion) and may seem to anticipate ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... true that the Alley had no tremendous personages in its membership, but its innate strength lay in this weakness for it represented the very embodiment of what is known as the concrete social spirit, "one for all, all for one," and with this motto it might have—and really did—stand against the entire ship. Neither the Purser, the Captain nor the crew dared oppose its opinions or wishes; in fact, the Alley thought of running down to Zanzibar and taking ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... Railway—spent the night at his office to see which way events were going to turn. In his unreasoning anger, as the day of misfortune dawned next morning, against destiny, against the far-away unknown missionaries, against all the adverse forces that were standing in the way of his wishes, there was one concrete figure in the foreground upon whom he could justifiably pour out his wrath: Sir William Gore, the Chairman of the "Equator," who, in the public opinion, was responsible for the undertaking. He would go to see Sir William that ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... a' for our right-fu' King," and set it beside the Jacobite song quoted above, and it is clear at once that with Mr. Swinburne we pass from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract. And in this direction Mr. Swinburne's muse has steadily marched. In his "Erechtheus" he tells how the gods gave Pallas the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... arrived at King Olomba's town yesterday morning, and found neither slaves nor barracoon there, I must confess that I was visited by some such suspicion as that of which Captain Perry has just been speaking, although in my case it did not take quite such a concrete and connected form. To my mind there is only one thing against your theory, sir," he continued, turning to the skipper, "and that is the existence of the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the characteristic of his mind, we must appeal to him through his senses. We must use the concrete; through it we must act upon his weak will and immature judgment. From his natural curiosity we must develop attention. His naturally strong perceptive powers must be made yet stronger; they must be led in proper directions and fixed upon appropriate objects. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... "I wish women would think a little less of Heaven in the abstract, and a little more of one another, in the concrete." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... 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
... the society of gnats, that the Institutes of Justinian were not objective realities, any more than they were absolute truths. And, indeed, the careless use of the word "Truth" itself, often misleads even the most accurate thinkers. A law cannot be spoken of as a truth, either absolute or concrete. It is a law of nature, that is to say, of my own particular nature, that I fall asleep after dinner, and my confession of this fact is a truth; but the bad habit is no more a truth than the statement of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... matter of fact, none of his listeners showed any inclination to cheer. War in the abstract was a thing to cheer about, but war in the concrete—war with its possibilities—thus brought home to each ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... coasted and farther to the suburban estates of several affluent citizens,—I presume the homes of Stearns and Frost of stove fame and others no longer remembered. These places, with their stately trees and greenhouses and careful lawns, have also been merged into the domain of brick and mortar and concrete. To the right of the market garden, between us and the South Road, lay the level, treeless tract, about fifty acres in extent, which was specifically known as Clark's Field, although all the unused land in the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... On the concrete terrace beside him a gatling-gun glimmered in the starlight; sentinels leaned on their elbows, sprawling across the parapets; shadowy ranks of sleeping men lay among the shrubbery ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... struck home to her, like a death, "this is him!" she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible other, when she knows the fearful other flesh, ah, dark- ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the other, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... and in demonstration of its value as applied to more recent times, even at the risk of being tedious, I will give some examples from my own professional experience. I do this because nothing adds more to the efficacy of truth than the translation of the abstract into the concrete. Withholding names, I will state the facts with fullness ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... essay' | Reb'el rebel' Com'port comport' | Ex'ile exile' | Rec'ord record' Com'pound compound' | Ex'port export' | Ref'use refuse' Com'press compress' | Ex'tract extract' | Re'tail retail' Con'cert concert' | Fer'ment ferment' | Sub'ject subject' Con'crete concrete' | Fore'cast forecast' | Su'pine supine' Con'duct conduct' | Fore'taste foretaste'| Sur'vey survey' Con fine confine' | Fre'quent frequent' | Tor'ment torment' Con'flict conflict' | Im'part impart' | Tra'ject traject' Con'serve conserve' ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... Peddie, the bibliographer, over one hundred pamphlets and books of that description. But from its very nature, and I am writing with the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of fiction carries with it something of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Truth by the so-called deductive than by the so-called inductive ladder, and it was not without meaning that she was represented as dwelling at the bottom of a well, for she is more surely reached by descending to her abode from the so-called abstract, than by climbing with our feet on the slippery concrete. Nay, even though physical science still insists in words on holding on to 'facts' and the testimony of the senses, forgetful that any fact is after all only a "relative synthesis," we find it in its latest ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... What are the concrete things which the worker can gain at once through birth control? First, a small family can live much better than a large one upon the wages now received. Workers could be better fed, clothed and educated. Again, fewer children in the families ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... face with one another; but we assault and carry off the one that is outside us, while that within us tends to absorb and make its own that without. Matter, attacked and conquered by form, gives place to concrete form. It is the matter, the content, that differentiates one of our intuitions from another: form is constant: it is spiritual activity, while matter is changeable. Without matter, however, our spiritual activity would ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce |
