"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seems as though the dreams of a spiritual renaissance, which promised so fairly but a little time ago, had perished in the sudden explosion of brute force. On the other hand, the thoughts of the English race are now turned, and rightly, towards the most concrete forms of action—struggle and endurance, practical sacrifices, difficult and long-continued effort—rather than towards the passive attitude of self-surrender which is all that the practice of mysticism seems, at first sight, to demand. Moreover, that ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... 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 ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... away the image, and never loses it. A popular assembly, like the House of Commons, or the French Chamber, or the American Congress, is commanded by these two powers,—first by a fact, then by skill of statement. Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... turned quickly up a flight of steps. At the foot of the broad staircase Kennedy paused to examine some rich carvings, and I felt him nudge me. I turned. It was an enclosed staircase, with walls that looked to be of re-enforced concrete. Swung back on hinges concealed like those of a modern burglar-proof safe was ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... on 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 accurately ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... no field for speculation in the analysis of right living. It conforms to the law of cause and effect. It is positively concrete in substance. A recital of the life history of Jonathan Edwards, in comparison with that of the celebrated "Jukes" family, emphasises this assumption with a degree of positiveness that is tragic in ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... time in her life her errant dreams took concrete shape. At last she began to feel the companionship of a particular man necessary for her happiness. She had never before realised the pleasure, the joy, to be derived from the presence of one of the opposite sex who was in sympathy, in ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... show, beyond doubt, that they had high symbolic meaning. Whether they were in the original foundation, or were placed there when the obelisk was removed, no one can tell. Nevertheless, they were there, concrete witnesses of the fact that the builders worked in the light of a mystical faith, of which ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... 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 ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... her a present there was nothing of this kind to discard. It had been part of his non-committal, impersonal attitude toward her that he had never given her a concrete sign that she meant anything to him whatever. He had thanked her on occasions for the comforting quality he found in her presence. He had, in so many words, recognized the fact that when he got into ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... river from the Laurentian wilds, but Montreal, shut in by the wooded mountain, sweltered in humid heat. Then the streets were being torn up to lay electric mains, and sand and cement blew about from half-finished concrete buildings. Thirlwell did not like large cities, and after the silence of the bush, the ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... Sound and concrete teaching like this is always necessary, but is hardly likely to be popular. The doctrine of disobedience is everywhere preached in a democracy; violation of contracts is a normal practice and law-breakers have been known to ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... show the nature of the works, which are of a simple character. The depth of water along the principal quay, which is being constructed of solid concrete, and is connected with the shore by an iron and steel viaduct over 750 ft. in length—which is already completed—will be 19 ft. at low water and 25 ft. at high. This quay and breakwater is shown in perspective, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... more than one. But you'd better produce at least half a dozen. And have some practice-bombs made up, out of concrete or anything, as long as they're the right weight and airfoil and have some way of releasing smoke. Get them done as soon as you have your case designed. We want to be able to make a couple of ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... of a basement floor laid twenty-one years ago, a portion of which was made by excavating one foot below the floor, six inches of coarse stone being filled in, then five inches of coal tar concrete made up with coarse gravel, and finally about one inch of fine gravel concrete. Before the concrete was laid, heavy stakes were driven through the floor about three feet apart, to which the floor timbers were nailed and leveled up. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... concrete instance of the artificial possibilities of Idaho and contiguous regions, I will here instance a statement made for me by the Rev. H. W. Parker, superintendent of Pocatello District, and resident of Twin Falls, under date of October, 1914: "Where ten years ago ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... discussing when, an hour later, they, too, disappeared into the darkness that swallowed up the trail to Ashley Ranch. That was the first of many such services. The preaching was always of the simplest kind, abstract questions being avoided and the concrete in those wonderful Bible tales, dressed in modern and in western garb, set forth. Bill and Hi were more than ever his friends and champions, and the latter was heard ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... hadn't taken anything except his salary (which really might have come under the head of "obtaining money under"; but that is neither here nor there); and, of course, the New York girl was really engaged to a concrete house contractor in the Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack and Helen ended in a half-Nelson—and there ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... for the existing conditions. There are, 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 Shakespeare, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... business of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... like Peroo, serang, to lash, and guy, and hold to control the donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure up-stream on a monsoon night and report on the state of the embankment-facings. He would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson and Hitchcock without fear, till his ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... it was inevitable that they should seek to invent a new manner of utterance. Renan was doubtless right in thinking that they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects; but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against them in the ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... Farthing lies buried high up on the bluffs opposite the school at Nenana, in a spot she was wont to visit for the fine view of Denali it commands, and her brother, the present bishop of Montreal, and some of her colleagues of the Alaskan mission, have set a concrete cross there. When we entered the Alaskan range by Cache Creek there rose directly before us a striking pyramidal peak, some twelve or thirteen thousand feet high. Not knowing that any name had been bestowed upon it, the author discharged himself of the duty that he conceived ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... before them at the little marble tables at the back. The gaudy, gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect. I wondered why I, a creature from the concrete world, was there. I had an insane impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and wander, wander for ever, away from the world. I was walking along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, when I stumbled ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... on the sponges furnishes such a proof, and, in my opinion, an indisputable proof. Any man of science who will follow the protracted steps of my inquiry and test my assertions will find that in the case of the sponges we can follow the actual evolution of species in a concrete case. And if this is so, if we can show the origin of all the species from a common form in one single class, we have the solution of the problem of man's origin, because we are in a position to prove clearly his ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... had told his friend how he felt, but not what had happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably, but somehow he would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in the letter there had been scant allusion to these concrete facts. Would Cambridge understand them either? He watched some dons who were peeping into an excavation, and throwing up their hands with humorous gestures of despair. These men would lecture next week on Catiline's ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... diplomacy, as he was in the other affairs of Government, he would have seized the opportunity of making the Peace of Amiens universal and durable. It is futile to contend that Napoleon was irreconcilable. His great ambition was to form a concrete friendship with our Government, which he foresaw could be fashioned into a continental arrangement, intricate and entangled as all the elements were at the time. Napoleon never ceased to deplore the impossibility ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the raw material for my reconstructions, and a few additional notes and references. I hope that this modest attempt to bring to life again some of 'our fathers that begat us', may perhaps interest for an hour or two the general reader, or the teacher, who wishes to make more concrete by personification some of the general facts of ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... foreign countries, of whose significance they have only a vague appreciation, but who never secure any real historical point of view or an appreciation of the importance of history because it has not been made concrete and intimate, as must be the case in considering local events? If national history is taught to develop patriotism, why should not local history be taught to inspire civic loyalty? Such a study of the efforts and sacrifices of former citizens would bring a new sense of obligation to be worthy ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... question was distinctly anti-German. Each one was for itself. Again, they were not particularly enamoured of one another, nor were their interests always concordant, and to constrain them by force to unite would have been not to prevent but to cause future wars. A Danubian federation—the concrete shape imagined for this new bulwark of European peace—did not commend itself to the Italians, who had their own reasons for their opposition besides the Wilsonian doctrine, which they invoked. If it be true, Signor Tittoni argues, that Austria does not desire to be ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... silently, each busy with his thoughts. A certain aspect of the matter which had always lain subconsciously in Merriman's mind was gradually taking concrete form. It had not assumed much importance when the two friends were first discussing their trip, but now that they were actually at grips with the affair it was becoming more obtrusive, and Merriman felt it must be faced. He therefore ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... This is no place to discuss the capacity of the feminine brain, and to venture into the dangerous field which Schopenhauer and his disciples and modern anthropologists have entered merely to quarrel in. The judge's business is the concrete case in which he must test the ex- pressions of a woman when they depend upon real or apparent knowledge, either just as he must test the testimony of any other witness, or by means of experts. We shall therefore indicate only the symptomatic value of feminine knowledge with regard to ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the coast of Scandinavia in his travels, and had even penetrated to the White Sea; the other, named Wulfstan, had sailed from Schleswig to Frische Haff. The geographical and ethnographical details of both accounts are exceedingly interesting, and their style is attractive, clear, and concrete." ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... of concrete. Standing within them one is impressed as by the mass of the Pyramids. The gates are hollow structures of steel, 7 feet thick. Their lower portions are water-tight, so that their buoyancy in the water will relieve the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... bitten him) he had blundered, and struck his knee-cap violently against a bollard close by the water's edge, and staggering under the anguish of it, had lost his footing and collapsed overboard. Then, finding that his fingers could take no hold on the slippery concrete wall of the basin, with his sound leg he had pushed himself out from it and grasped the barge's head-rope. All this, between groans, he managed to explain to the policeman, who, having sent for an ambulance ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a later world-breed. His traditions were less concrete and without reverence, and he said, "Not so, Sipsu. You are young, and yet in the full joy of life. The witch doctor is a fool, and his choice is evil. This thing ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... associates made free with his coats, boots, and hats for their own use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably, in a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois; and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to wear mine. There is no neck in the world that I want my collar to span ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... most cases unconsciously—many of Spencer's more detailed suggestions. The laboratory method of instruction, for example, now common for scientific subjects in good schools, is an application of his doctrines of concrete illustration, training in the accurate use of the senses, and subordination of book-work. Many schools realise, too, that learning by heart and, in general, memorising from books are not the only means of storing the mind of a child. They should ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... much more concrete figure. At any moment as I walked the Avenue she might come around the corner, or step from a brougham, or be looking at me from the windows of a brown-stone mansion. Was it a wonder that my eyes were ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... a basis of experience tells us something about what is not experienced, is based upon a belief which experience can neither confirm nor confute, yet which, at least in its more concrete applications, appears to be as firmly rooted in us as many of the facts of experience. The existence and justification of such beliefs—for the inductive principle, as we shall see, is not the only example—raises some of the most difficult and ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, are generally those which are found to be most difficult and to diverge most widely from the English idiom. The translator will often have to convert the more abstract Greek into the more concrete English, or vice versa, and he ought not to force upon one language the character of another. In some cases, where the order is confused, the expression feeble, the emphasis misplaced, or the sense somewhat faulty, he will not strive in ...
— Charmides • Plato
... natural freshwater resources: large concrete or natural rock water catchments collect rainwater (no longer used for drinking water) and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... of motion to the front was apparent—an unnumbered sense, rather than concrete feeling. Motion to front, influenced by the rising and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... no more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times—coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)—a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... he says, "is veiled under two extremely abstract phrases, 'the Infinite and the Absolute.'... But it is one of the most unquestionable of all logical maxims, that the meaning of the abstract must be sought in the concrete, and not conversely."[AK]—Now, in the first place, "the Infinite" and "the Absolute," even in the sense in which they are both predicable of God, are no more names of God than "the creature" and "the finite" are names of man. They are the names of ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... half to himself, half to the astonished secretary, "create their own patterns. Sound builds; sound destroys; and invisible sound-vibrations affect concrete matter. For all sounds produce forms—the forms that correspond to them, as you shall now see. Within every form lies the silent sound that first called it into view—into visible shape—into being. Forms, shapes, bodies are the vibratory ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... the enunciation of these dry definitions, I should ill exemplify that method of teaching this branch of physical science, which it is my chief business to-night to recommend. Let us turn away then from abstract definitions. Let us take some concrete living thing, some animal, the commoner the better, and let us see how the application of common sense and common logic to the obvious facts it presents, inevitably leads us into all these branches ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... fundamental dogma: "There is no special supernatural;" but in the main I am still your disciple. Life is only of value by devotion to what is true and good. Your conception of what is good was too narrow; your view of truth too material and too concrete, but you were, upon the whole, in the right, and I thank you for having inculcated in me like a second nature the principle, fatal to worldly success but prolific of happiness, that the aim of a life worth living should be ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... As a concrete illustration of the above statement, I want to point to a young man, intelligent, enterprising, industrious, and a graduate of the best known agricultural college poultry course in the country. This lad invested some $18,000 of his own and his friends' ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... they may be employed in cleaning books which have been defaced by writing on the margin, without impairing the text. Lemon juice and the juice of sorrel will also remove ink stains, but not so easily as the concrete acid of lemons, or citric acid. On some occasions it will be found sufficient, only to dip the spotted part in the fine melted tallow of a mould candle, and afterwards wash it ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... anything!" cried the other excitedly, "but someone mentioned your name to me at the club—said you could see through concrete, and all that—and here I am. There's something wrong, radically wrong. Find out what it is and send the bill to me. Then perhaps I'll be able to sleep ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... made a public offer of a 'naval holiday,' a suspension of new construction by mutual consent. The Imperial Chancellor responded only by suggesting that the proposal was entirely unofficial, by asking for concrete proposals, and by saying that the idea constituted a great progress; and his naval estimates in 1913 were half a million higher ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... was an expert swimmer. What could it be? Immediately following her cry came Sholto's deep bay, and then I saw her. She was standing on a tall, white, lozenge-shaped rock, that looked almost as if it had been carefully shaped in concrete. She was kneeling, and her arm was across her face. With a cry I dashed into the river, and floundered across, sometimes almost up to my neck, and ran stumbling to her in a blind agony of fear. Even as I ran her rod was carried past me, ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... 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
... amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing in the mediaeval civilization ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... pressure is likely to be attended with an escape of ground air from the soil, and therefore to cause injury to health, especially among the occupants of basement rooms, unless the whole interior of the building be covered with concrete. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ever ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... conditions as are applied to whites, despite the alleged fact that his expectation of life is less and not so easy to determine, owing to the lack of information as to the health and longevity of his forebears. Sketching first thus our general conclusions it remains for us only to give a few concrete examples drawn from the legislation ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... first questions to be asked when we take up this inquiry is, What is the attitude of our religion toward the other religions? Perhaps it is better to put the question in a concrete form and ask, What is the attitude of the Christian people toward the people of ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... nervous manner, the critic did not confine himself to his topic, but touched on a number of significant peripheral subjects. He showed the virtue of concrete and specific imagery at a time when most poets sought the sanctuary of abstractions and universals; commented cogently on the styles of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare; anticipated the later doctrine of the power of the incomplete ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... who create 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 ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magician's practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... handsome, rather than pretty, when she was younger. Everything about Mrs. de Lancey was correct, absolutely correct. Her dress looked like a form into which she had been poured, every line and curve being just as it should be, having "set" as if she had been made of reinforced concrete. In short, she was a ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... 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, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... religion can survive the supernatural element which is the reason for its existence. Natural religion seems to be the tomb of all historic cults. All concrete religions die eventually in the pure air of philosophy. So long then as the life of nations is in need of religion as a motive and sanction of morality, as food for faith, hope, and charity, so long will the masses ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... conglutination, agglutination, agglomeration; aggregation; consolidation, set, cementation; sticking, soldering &c v.; connection; dependence. tenacity, toughness; stickiness &c 352; inseparability, inseparableness; bur, remora. conglomerate, concrete &c (density) 321. V. cohere, adhere, stick, cling, cleave, hold, take hold of, hold fast, close with, clasp, hug; grow together, hang together; twine round &c (join) 43. stick like a leech, stick like wax; stick close; cling like ivy, cling like a bur; adhere like a remora, adhere like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... chance of being 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 Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the contemplative pipe, which for half a dozen puffs wafted him to bracing deserts, or primaeval forests, or old highways with the swallow thoughts above him, down the Past, into the Future. A pipe is pleasant dreams at command. A pipe is the concrete form of philosophy. Why, then, a pipe is the alternative of a friar's frock for an escape from women. But if one does not smoke! . . . Here and there a man is visibly in the eyes of all men cursed: let him be blest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he climbed in the back too. Haney crowded in after him. They filled the rear of the car entirely. It started off swiftly across the field, swerving to the roadway that led to the highway out of Bootstrap to the Shed. It sped out that long white concrete ribbon, and the desert was abruptly all around them. Far ahead, the great round half-dome of the Shed looked like a cherry-pit ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis), reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... emotion, to discover what it is, and why, that has so stung him—to defend and to justify his transport to himself and to others. He seeks a reason for the faith that is in him. And so have arisen the speculative theories of the nature of beauty, on the one hand, and the studies of concrete beauty and our feelings about it, on the other. Speculative theory has taken its own way, however, as a part of philosophy, in relating the Beautiful to the other great concepts of the True and the Good; building up an architectonic of abstract ideas, far from the immediate ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Christological questions were settled once and for all in the fifth century. Each generation has to settle them afresh. Accordingly, to exhibit the consequences of the monophysite formula, to show how wrong abstract ideas develop into wrong concrete ideas and falsify Christian practice, is a task ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... see this chances are excellent that I shall be dead. However, that is of little importance. I have found the proof we need—their distribution plant. It's an old warehouse. I am going there to see if I cannot obtain concrete proof—perhaps a pocketful of tokens. If I fail, you must carry on. Farewell, professor. It was ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... reasons were that he, himself, was more developed—had outgrown the childish restlessness of the first attempt; and last but strongest of all, was the compelling personality of the president. With what consummate tact had he first offered to Jim's wild spirit the concrete, the simple, the history of to-day, the things that clearly were of immediate use; and later—much later, and in lesser degree—the abstruse, the doctrinal. And when the younger mind of the student came to a place that seemed too hard, or met ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, — let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... controller of the Caucus. It was widely known that he, like Fawcett, had professed republican principles. But Queen Victoria's objection to Sir Charles Dilke—and it will be seen how strongly she maintained it—was based not merely on his avowal of abstract Republican theories, but also on his very concrete proposal to assert control over the Civil List. Chamberlain upon this matter was not committed to a personal view, and it had not yet been demonstrated that whatever position Dilke defended, Chamberlain ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw, upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... industrious, accustomed for centuries to a state of comparative civil freedom, and to a lively foreign trade, by which their minds were saved from the stagnation of bigotry. It was natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract character of Rome itself. The Flemish, above all their other qualities, were a commercial nation. Commerce was the mother of their freedom, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical necessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose any circling return. Material things are thoughts which God transiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures are thoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality. The soul is a thought; the body is the word in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the drawn blinds. Captain Hagberd always described his purchases to her, carefully, as to a person having a legitimate interest in them. The overgrown yard of his cottage could be laid over with concrete... after to-morrow. ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... captured the whole works without any trouble. The underground cavern had no natural opening to the surface, but one had been made by blasting. We captured the whole lot and then sealed the end of the hole with rock and concrete. That was the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... accident she knocked her cobwebbed 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 and covered dishes suggestively laid away in it, met her ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... over the rock on bare feet to thank him," the girl replied, her big eyes shining. And with the words there entered into Jerry-Jo's distorted imagination a concrete and lasting jealousy of poor Dick Travers, who was innocent of any actual memory of Priscilla Glenn. Travers at that time was studying as few college men do, always with the spur of lost years and a big ambition ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... a party of three men should travel to Cape Crozier from winter quarters during the winter months in order to secure emperor penguins' eggs. The ship was to call at Cape Crozier, land provisions, and erect a small hut of fibro-concrete sheets for the use of this party. The ship was off the Cape on the afternoon of January 9, and a boat put off with Stenhouse, Cope, Joyce, Ninnis, Mauger, and Aitken to search for a landing-place. "We steered in towards the Barrier," wrote Stenhouse, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the floor upstairs. That strengthens it. It is shored up from inside with rafters. This makes the roof shell-proof, except for big shells, and the enemy always use big shells. The cellar floors are concrete. ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... directly to the things themselves. Especially is this so with what has been described as the moral feeling for nature. Among "the unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece," as Wordsworth says, the deep effect of natural beauty on the mind was expressed under the forms of a concrete symbolism, a language to which literature had grown so accustomed that they had neither the power nor the wish to break free from it. The appeal indeed from man to Nature, and especially the appeal to Nature as knowing ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... that rock of concrete ashes, he speculated on the probable extent of the shoals and reefs by which he was surrounded. Judging by what he then saw, and recalling the particulars of the examination made from the cross-trees of the ship, he supposed that the dangers and difficulties of the navigation must ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... This defect might give English a great advantage if the Boers wished to express abstract ideas. But they have not this wish, for they have no abstract ideas to express. They are a people who live in the concrete. ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... to the concrete, we would remark that, whether the reader does or does not admit the general proposition, that western trappers are pre-eminently up to fire (not to mention smoke or snuff), he cannot deny the fact that Big Waller, the Yankee trapper, was peculiarly gifted ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... should be selected near bodies of fresh water and tremendous excavations made. The walls and floor of the excavations should be lined with concrete, through which the water is piped. The cities could be on many levels, the topmost peraps several miles in the air—glass enclosed—and with pipes reaching still igher to bring air in, and completely tight against the Grass. They should be selfcontained, generating their own power ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... of this wonderful conception is Lord Kelvin. The idea was born in his mind of a happy union of mathematical calculations with concrete experiments. The mathematical calculations were largely the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who, about the year 1858, had undertaken to solve some unique problems in vortex motions. Helmholtz found that a vortex whirl, once established in a frictionless medium, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... constitutes the common genus for light and luminous bodies. But on this view Brahman becomes a mere abstract generic character inhering in the Lord (isvara), sentient souls and non-sentient matter, just as the generic character of horses (asvatva) inheres in concrete individual horses; and this contradicts all the teaching of Sruti and Smriti (according to which Brahman is the highest concrete entity). We therefore hold that non-sentient matter stands to Brahman in the same relation as the one previously proved for ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... than pleased, or even enraptured. And I can imagine how even the most self-content of men, if he absorb the meaning of Europe, must feel his insignificance. If he has wit enough to reflect that all these represented ages, with their extraordinary results, abstract and concrete, have come and gone with no aid of his; that no prophet ever whispered his name among the thousands of great in every conceivable destiny; that he is, mentally and physically, simply a result of evolution ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... twenty centuries have beaten in vain. Looking at the state of the Roman Empire when Cicero died, who would not declare its doom? But it did "retrick its beams," not so much by the hand of one man, Augustus, as by the force of the concrete power collected within it—"Quod non imber edax non aquilo impotens Possit diruere."[208] Cicero with patriotic gallantry thought that even yet there might be a chance for the old Republic—thought that by his eloquence, by his vehemence of words, he could turn men from ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... change the metaphor—a steady foundation upon which her heart could safely build. He would not, could not, ever fail her. This had been sufficient to stay her longing for sight and speech of him, her longing for his bodily presence. But now, in face of the very concrete facts of the island, the inn, which bore his name and where his mother lived and ruled, of the property he owned, the place and people to which—by half at least of his nature and much more than half his memory—he belonged, the comfort of this spiritual esoteric relation became but ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Accordingly in defining an accident in the abstract, we do not put the subject as though it were the first part of the definition, viz. the genus; but we give it the second place, which is that of the difference; thus we say that simitas is "a curvature of the nose." But if we take accidents in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates at the accident: for "a white thing" is "something that has whiteness." Accordingly in defining this kind of accident, we place the subject as the genus, which is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... readers and a greater following, although he, of course, expresses only the aspirations of the Pan-Germans. But he presents concrete positions which ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... music, poetry, painting or drama. All art is an attempt to express a sense of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea, which idea is a consciousness of an amazing and adorable quality ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... runways are included in this listing. For airports with more than one runway, only the longest runway is included. Not all airports have facilities for refueling, maintenance, or air traffic control. Paved runways have concrete or asphalt surfaces; unpaved runways have grass, ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... 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 not have ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... arched above Montrose Place, but they were shabby and dying. And the mossy bricked sidewalk was gone but on its muddy concrete successor, scores and scores of noisy, dirty, alien children squabbled and cried. Some of them were pushing against this strange woman who had descended from the motor, some of them fingered her coat, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... into the water. The Oxonians were the first to show a lead, and at the Creek ["Creek" scratched out and nothing substituted] were a foot to the good. The Craydle is a pleasing river with banks running up from the sea to slopes up the Concrete Wall this advantage was fully ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... cliffs crowned with green wreaths of tamarisk. The sea comes creeping up, or else the wind raises great white breakers; if the waves are quiet, old breakwaters, long ago broken themselves, smashed fragments here and there of concrete protections put by man, gaps in the cliff and changes in the coast-line, remind us of the vast force behind the gentle and persistent lap of water. The beach itself reminds us of it; there a flint and here a rounded pebble made out of ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... present possible to point out any concrete means by which these things may be accomplished, but it is not impossible that, when reason shall be returned to the Governments now at war, they themselves may suggest to one another plans and ways and means how ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... lesson of facts is very often more striking than that of doctrine. They are here the concrete expression, in the various nations, and through the course of centuries, of those fundamental principles we have just considered. It is indeed a law of Catholic History, that the more Catholic a nation is, the more apostolic, the more missionary it will prove itself to be. The missionary ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... up bright and red is 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
... a tarpaulin to disclose a ragged hole in the concrete floor, the opening extended into the earth ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... it must be an armour-clad rooster of this species that, crossed with a Plymouth Rock, was responsible for the reinforced-concrete chicken that we met at dinner ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... older outline have given place to stubby cargo booms of liners, freighters and tramps of multiple flags and nationalities. Along the Embarcadero they disgorge upon massive concrete piers silk, rice and tea from the Orient, coffee from Central America, hemp and tobacco from the Philippines, and all manner of odds and ends from everywhere. On the piers commodities are piled in apparent confusion, yet each lot moves with precision in or out of yawning holds at the ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... a definite and concrete turn to the critical examination of these three fundamentals, let us take a passage from a recently published booklet. The author tells how that on a certain sunny afternoon he flung himself down on the bank ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... this chart may be clearly understood, several concrete examples are given. Thus, the farmer who delivers vegetables directly to the consumer is an example of plan No. 1. He has very little overhead expense and consequently can sell cheaper than dealers who have a large overhead expense. However, when the farmer delivers his vegetables to the grocer and ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... which they could stand as a colorable ground of armed conflict. The Kaiser had prepared for war, no doubt. The argument and justification of war as the means of spreading the German Kultur were in the Potsdam mind. But the concrete and definite occasion of war was lacking. How long would that lack hold off the storm? Could the precarious peace be maintained until measures to enforce and protect it by common consent could ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... the amount of social friction and consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray it in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium of art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting on each other—as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box, and jumbled side ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... who is 'for ever Divine and Eternal,' who is 'the One, devoid of all determinations.' 'This Body of Dharma,' we are told, 'has no boundary, no quarters, but is embodied in all bodies.... All forms of corporeality are involved therein; it is able to create all things. Assuming any concrete material form, as required by the nature and condition of karma, it illuminates all creations.... There is no place in the universe where this Body does not prevail. The universe becomes dust; this Body for ever remains. It is free from all opposites and contraries, ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... could be procured in sufficient size and mass without the difficulties attendant upon shrinkage in the burning, and the winding and unevenness of the lines thereby caused. They have also an even more tractable material in concrete ready to their hand, if they would seriously bring themselves to the task of stamping an expressive art upon it, instead of going on designing concrete houses as if they were stone ones. Cast iron has the advantage of being a tried material; it is well adapted for structures ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present—no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... 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. But she saw that to him they ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... analytic of its own motives, that through the principle of counterpoise it strives to lose itself and release itself in continual rhetoric and emotional positions? Is not the German mind so alive to the material facts of life, to the necessity of getting hold of concrete advantages in life, and of not letting them go, that it deliberately slackens the bent bow, and plunges itself and relaxes itself in floods of abstractions, and idealisations, and dreams of sentimentality? Assuredly it is because the Russian is so inwardly discontented with his own actions ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Nursery Days, and announced his intention to send the story of "Jimmie and the Strawberry-mine" to him shortly—which was unfortunate. If he had finished the story first and then sent it, it might have been good enough to convince the editor against his judgment that he ought to have it. A concrete story can often accomplish more than an abstract idea. In this event it could not have accomplished less, anyhow, for the editor promptly replied that he did not care for a second story of that ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... whose serum resembles most the white of an egg. It has therefore been most rationally concluded, that the origin of the animal spirits is from aliments capable of being changed into a similar substance, but so attenuated by incalation as to concrete by fire. For this reason the greatest support of the spirits is afforded by light and nourishing meats and drinks, which in taste and smell are even agreeable to infants. All cordials and aromatics are consequently the most proper for such purposes, and at such ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... was far from satisfied with his son, but did not dare to go on further with the argument. In all such discussions he was wont to feel that his son was "talking the hind legs off a dog." His own ideas on concrete points were clear enough to him,—as this present idea that his daughter, Lady Frances Trafford, would outrage all propriety, all fitness, all decency, if she were to give herself in marriage to George ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... the myths of different nations is made apparent; the date in human history of their creation; and the cause of them is sought in the attempt to express abstract ideas by means of the extension of concrete terms. See the Essay on Comparative Mythology by Max Mueller, in the Oxford Essays for 1856. See also the Journal for Comp. Phil. of Kuhn and Aufrecht. And for a criticism on Creuzer, see E. Renan's Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... a reconciliation of these two conceptions will be found in a clear recognition of the two modes in which God is apprehended and consequently loved by the human mind and heart; the one concrete and experimental, accessible to the simplest and least cultured, and of necessity for all; the other, abstract in a sense—a knowledge through the ideas and representations of the mind, demanding a certain degree of intelligence ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... unpractised readers in former days, where they were moved along under the line as an aid to the vision. The special verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by Bathsheba, and the sublime words met her eye. They slightly thrilled and abashed her. It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete. Folly in the concrete blushed, persisted in her intention, and placed the key on the book. A rusty patch immediately upon the verse, caused by previous pressure of an iron substance thereon, told that this was not the first ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, transposed, 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. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... must have also appealed to the growing taste for poetry that was less ornate and studied. His practice was to use a large number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe objects and forces common to rural life. A simple listing of the common nouns from the opening of "Fragment I" will serve to illustrate this tendency: love, son, hill, deer, dogs, bow-string, wind, stream, rushes, mist, oak, friends. ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... foreground; (3) to the skill with which he presents matter-of-fact details, sufficient to invest the story with an atmosphere of perfect reality; (4) to his style, which is as simple and direct as the speech of real life, and which is made vivid by specific words describing concrete actions,—such as hewing a tree, sharpening a stake, hanging up grapes to dry, tossing a biscuit to a wild cat, taking a motherless kid in his arms; and (5) to the skill with which he sets a problem requiring ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... easy, being founded on correct mechanical principles, and attaining the great objects required—viz. smoothness, durability, and quiet. The blocks, which are shaped at such an angle that they give the most perfect mutual support, are joined to each other by oaken dowels, and laid on a hard concrete foundation, presenting a level surface, over which the impact is so equally divided, that the whole mass resists the pressure on each particular block; and yet, from being formed in panels of about ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various |
