"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had long since gone to their homes, since there was no work for them at the dock after Houten's small parcel of trade goods had gone up to the post, and the two vessels lay as quiet and peaceful as if in some humdrum port of concrete wharves and steam cranes. But now, as if to answer the doubts of the brigantine's people, a gangway light shone out on the schooner, and another, dimmer and partly obscured, sent yellow rays ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... is encircled by twelve forts, built about twenty-eight years ago under the personal direction of General Brialmont? They are on the same principle as those of Namur and Bucharest, and are large affairs of concrete, sunk three stories under ground and furnished with elaborate electrical apparatus. Covering and protecting the cannon are automatic, armored cupolas, rising and falling with the modern, disappearing guns. Here is a ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... As a matter of fact, her thoughts were always fixed on the artistic, social, and dramatic aspects of life, with unfortunately a kind of nebulosity of conception which permitted no condensation into anything definite or concrete. She could only be wildly and feverishly interested. Just then the door clicked to Frank's key—it was nearing six—and in he came, smiling, confident, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Asgard. He was ever carnivorous and eupeptic. We New Englanders are perhaps the leanest of his descendants, because we have forsaken too much the old ways and habits of the race, and given ourselves too much to abstractions and transcendentalism. The old Teuton abhorred the abstract. He loved the concrete, the substantial. The races of Southern Europe, what are now called the Latin races, were more temperate than the Teutonic, but they were far less brave, honest, and manly. Their sensuality might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dominant functions,[A] of physiological dynasties, would seem therefore to be a fact. And our series of forms described in the second, third, and fourth chapters is merely a concrete illustration showing how this sequence may have been evolved. The substitution of other terms in the anatomical series there described—amoeba, volvox, etc.—would not affect this result. By a change in the form of our history we have eliminated to a large extent the sources of ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... really want to know "whether oatmeal is preferable to pie as an American national food"? I suppose the best answer I can give to your question is to tell you what is my own practice. Oatmeal in the morning, as an architect lays a bed of concrete to form a base for his superstructure. Pie when I can get it; that is, of the genuine sort, for I am not patriotic enough to think very highly of the article named after the Father of his Country, who was first in war, first in ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... the subterrane with piercing screams. But those to whom she appealed turned a deaf ear; for a convent is a tomb in which all human sympathies are immured—a vortex wherein all the best feelings that concrete in the mortal ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... large building, with a cellar which forms the molasses reservoir. Over this reservoir is an open framework of joists, upon which stands a number of empty potting casks. Each of these has eight or ten holes bored through the bottom, and in each hole is placed the stalk of a plantain leaf. The soft, concrete mass of sugar is removed from the cooling pans in which it has been brought from the boilers and placed in the casks. The molasses then gradually drains from the crystallized portion into the reservoir below, percolating through the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... suggested that evening 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
... 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 brick or ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... not a single man, but a type; the concrete illustration of a vague ideal he had long known. He realized as the others did not, that the speaker was merely practising on them—training, as the man himself would have said. When Landers was critically conscious, he was not deceived; yet, with this knowledge, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... I am here only illustrating the way in which the pontifical college acquired their paramount influence by having a quantity of new and difficult work forced upon them, and it is not part of my plan to explain the early history of adoptions and wills; but I may give a single concrete illustration for the benefit of those who are not versed in Roman law. It must constantly have happened, in that disturbed period which brought the kingship to an end, that by death or capture in war a family was left without male heirs. Daughters could not take their place, because the sacra ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... arbitrary acts of the government prove how easily, on the plea of patriotic necessity, a people, nay, the public opinion, submits to arbitrary rule. All this, servility included, explains the facility with which, in former times, concentrated and concrete despotisms have been established. Here every such arbitrary action is submitted to, because it is so new, and because the people has the childish, naive, but, to it, honorable confidence, that the power entrusted ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... all these horrible thoughts had taken concrete form in her brain, she heard the grounding of arms outside, close to the door, and Desgas' voice shouting "Halt!" ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... imagination and an almost unequalled power of illustration. The thought is always concrete, and he is never satisfied with the vague ideas and abstract conceptions which so easily moved his contemporaries. No speeches, either in English or in German, preserve so much of their freshness. He is almost the only Parliamentary orator whose speeches have ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... is ever permissible, which in national matters will scarcely be contested, it is logically just that it should fall first of all upon the capital, where the interests and honor of the nation are centred. There, if anywhere, the responsibility for the war and all its incidents is concrete in the representatives of the nation, executive and legislative, and in the public offices from which all overt acts are presumed to emanate. So it befell the United States. In the first six months of 1814, the warfare in the Chesapeake continued on the same general lines as in 1813; there ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... distant mumble to a shrieking roar, and the next thing, each man had landed upon the concrete-and-paint bull's-eye ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... of revolution bears two forms. They may be discrete or concrete, but they are two—ideas, movement,—cause, result—force, effect. And progressive humanity marches upon its future with ideas for its centre, movement its right and left wings. Not a step is taken till the Great Field-Marshal has sent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the Photoplay 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, ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... skins for his pack of furs. He has little idea of what we mean when we tell him he has five hundred skins' worth of fur, so we count out five hundred of these made beaver—he can see them, can feel them—the value of his catch is immediately reduced to something concrete—something he can understand—then we take away the amount of his debt, and if there are still some made beaver remaining, he knows he has something left over to spend for finery and frippery. Rarely does he use these extra skins for ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... cheese. The larger 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 aromatic ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... coast, a few miles above Santa Barbara, there are, I have been told, immense quantities of pure bitumen or mineral tar, which, rising in the ocean, has been thrown upon the shore by the waves, where in a concrete state, like resin, it has accumulated in inexhaustible masses. There are, doubtless, many valuable minerals in the neighbouring mountains, which, when developed by enterprise, will add greatly to the wealth ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... instant to her wishes, but cleared in a manner which must haunt her to her own dying day, was enough to turn a brain already heated with contending emotions. Fancies took the place of facts, and by the time she reached this house had so woven themselves into a concrete form that no word she now utters can be relied on. This is how I see it, Mr. Hammersmith, and it is on this basis I ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... on, through, endless boulevards, some bustling, some dingy, some tawdry and flaring, some melancholy and mean; rows of garden gods, planted on the walls of yards full of vases and divinities of concrete, huge railway halls, monster hotels, dissenting chapels in the form of Gothic churches, quaint ancient almshouses that were once built in the fields, and tea-gardens and stingo-houses and knackers' yards. They were in a district far beyond the experience of Lothair, which ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... claimed to be a deep thinker. He did not spend his time, like Michael Angelo, in devising theories to explain the realms of art. He was without analytical pedantry, and, like his character, his work was naive and direct. Nor was he absorbed by appreciation of "beauty," abstract or concrete. If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make his portrait, assuming that the entity was not in conflict with the subject in hand. Hence the Zuccone. Its mesmeric ugliness is the effect of Donatello's ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... 1913 and in 1914, though in 1913 the First Lord of the Admiralty 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 than ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... man; but they were never so concrete, so fond as these dreams that swept him now. In the soft candlelight the girl's beauty moved him and glorified him, the very fact of her presence thrilled him to the depths, the wistfulness and appeal in her face seemed to burn him like fire. This northern land was never the home ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... each moment of the transient hour, When Rest accumulates sensorial power, 270 The impatient Senses, goaded to contract, Forge new ideas, changing as they act; And, in long streams dissever'd, or concrete In countless tribes, the fleeting forms repeat. Which rise excited in Volition's trains, Or link the sparkling rings of Fancy's chains; Or, as they flow from each translucent source, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... conquests of the last decade might have been lost, had not the First Consul, to use his own expressive phrase, "thrown in some blocks of granite." We may intensify his metaphor and assert that out of the shifting shingle of French life he constructed a concrete breakwater, in which his own will acted as the binding cement, defying the storms of revolutionary or royalist passion which had swept the incoherent atoms to and fro, and had carried desolation far inland. Thenceforth ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... methods of teaching and subject matter. The other aims to give the simple, concrete facts of psychology as the science of the mind. The former presupposes a close relationship between psychology and methods of teaching and assumes that psychology is studied chiefly as an aid to teaching. The latter is less complicated. ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... little question about the order of the other forms. Description, still dealing with the concrete, offers an admirable opportunity for shaping and forming the spontaneous expression gained in narration. Following description, in order of difficulty, ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the head of Litchfield ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... hogpen, horse stable, cesspool or similar accumulation of filth, and must be over 50 feet from cow stalls or places where milking is done. In regard to the size of the milk room and equipment, nothing is said provided it is large enough for the milk to be handled conveniently. Concrete milk houses, however, had best have smooth-finished floors and walls. The interior of the milk house is also to be whitewashed once in two years or oftener. If milk from the dairy is to go to a city, the requirements will ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely because he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of his own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where he got his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking at him.' Then there was ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... man the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is something of a puzzle—on the face of it an arithmetical paradox; suggestive, moreover, of the abstract subtleties of speculation rather than of the concrete realities of religious life. But the doctrine did not have its origin, as a matter of historical fact, in any perverse love of subtlety or speculation. It certainly arose out of living realities of spiritual experience. It arose as the result of an attempt, ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... his successes, and the resounding triumph of his naughtiness there, by a reflex action, secured the vote of London. Posterity has fully sanctioned this particular "judicium Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui generis, and in the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete form in successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this small masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the Great Cham's Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... timbers, resting on bundles of branches lashed together, are 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
... or jetty, which was dashed to pieces more than a score of years ago, remains as it was; The landing-place calls loudly for a T-headed pier of concrete blocks, or a gangway supported upon wooden piles and metal pilasters: one does not remark the want in fine weather; one does bitterly on bad days. There has been no attempt to make a port or even a debarcadere by ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Pathos, resignation and a sort of recreating FAITH are painted against that threatening wall and overhanging dirt.... If that should fall WE ARE ALL BOUND TO SUFFOCATE before any help can come.... My 'prisoner' is not a bit discouraged, however.... He is using his jackknife against the concrete wall with great patience and whistling softly and slowly an air from 'The Blessing of the Waters.'... WATER!... I know those girls are CHOKING for a drink as I have been for the last ten hours myself.... Still, not one of them has murmured at ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... concrete impulse that now favors socialism in this country is the insane purpose to deprive labor organizations of the full and complete rights that go with ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... outfalls constructed of glazed stoneware socketed pipes surrounded with concrete, as shown in Fig. 21, cast iron pipes are used in the majority of cases. There is considerable variation in the design of the joints for the latter class of pipes, some of which are shown in Figs. 22, ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... with a certain degree of abstraction,—that is, with an actual separation from the name of the thing possessed; and that accordingly there are, in the simple personal pronouns, (where such a distinction is most needed,) two different forms of the case; the one adapted to the concrete, and the other to the abstract construction. That form of the pronoun, however, which is equivalent in sense to the concrete and the noun, is still the possessive case, and nothing more; as, "All mine are ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... concrete example. Ferrero's Cerceris (C. Ferreri, VAN DER LIND) consumes Weevils. Her burrows are usually lined with Phynotomi and Sitones both an indeterminate grey, and Otiorhynchi, black or tan-coloured. Now I have sometimes happened to unearth from ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... strong conformist. He became grave. When I was indiscreet enough to reveal that I was inclined to pin my faith to the concrete liberty of women, rather than to a vague and abstract "human freedom," which was supposed to descend upon the world, once the Germans were beaten, I know he wanted to call me "seditious." But he is ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that—to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—"human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him." Enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youth—when he gushed into "dearests" in his letters—we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and other Offices, got together under these strange circumstances, cannot well be expected to be the best that human ingenuity could devise; the wonder rather is to see them so good as they are. Who made them, ask me not. Made they clearly were; for we see them here in a concrete condition, writing despatches, and drawing salary with a view to buy pudding. But how those Offices in Downing Street were made; who made them, or for what kind of objects they were made, would be hard to say at present. Dim visions and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... importance. At El Tovar the matter was given more than usual care and foresight. An antiseptic system was installed, at a cost of over twenty thousand dollars. The sewage is conveyed by underground pipes a long distance to solid concrete tanks, where the solids are disposed of by natural processes. The liquids pass through eight filter beds, and then enter ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... Analysis of Concrete Attentive State. Cross-section of Mental Stream. Focal Object, Clear; Marginal Objects, Dim. Fluctuation. Ease of Concentration Requires (1) Removal of All Marginal Distractions Possible, (2) Ignoring ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the public mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multiplies inducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance of such inducements, with the result that while in its practical life it rushes in one direction, it erects in its courts a fantastic counsel of perfection which points in a direction precisely ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... which they furnish temptation, and in the quality and nature of such temptation. In the former, the danger of falling is less, in the latter it is more, probable. In theory, it is impossible to draw the line and say just when an occasion ceases to be proximate and becomes remote; but in the concrete the thing is easy enough. If I have a well-grounded fear, a fear made prudent by experience, that in this or that conjuncture I shall sin, then it is a near occasion for me. If, however, I can feel with knowledge and conviction that I am strong enough to overcome the inevitable temptation ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... system, the introduction of certain great principles, the elevation of religious ideas, the delivery of Divine truths, the exhibition of a life and example, but as the call and creation of a definite, concrete, organised society of men. The subject, of investigation is not merely the character and history of the Person, but the Person as connected with His work. Christ is regarded not simply in Himself or in His teaching, as the Founder of a philosophy, a morality, a theology in the abstract, but ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Virginia, Georgia, and even Pennsylvania and New York; and under a democratic system of government this meant that these States were more or less responsive to their demands. It was greatly to the interest of the frontiersmen that their demands should be gratified, while other citizens had no very concrete concern in the matter one way or the other. In addition to this, and even more important, was the fact that there were large classes of the population everywhere who felt much sense of identity with the frontiersmen, and sympathized with them. The fathers ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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 ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... They also have trees planted along them; this seems to be a characteristic of France, and readers will recall that in all war pictures where these roads have been shown, the rows of trees are always there. This is an excellent feature and one that California with its rapidly increasing mileage of concrete roads, ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... is not, therefore, because I am endeavoring to lay down a foundation of religious concrete, on which to build piers of policy, that you so often find me quoting Bible texts in defense of this or that principle or assertion. But the fact that such references are an offense, as I know them to be, to many of the readers of these political essays, is one among ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... and, loving him, loved the metaphysics which were a part of him, yet it was without changing his own essentially opposite disposition. Lamb clung to the earth. He cultivated the excellency of this life. He was concrete, and hugged the world as he did his sister. He reverently followed the discourses of Coleridge, admiring, perhaps, "the beauty of the words, but not the words themselves"; but when the Opium-Eater also began to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... safe-deposit as an intending renter. The manager showed him over the vaults and strong-rooms, explaining the various precautions taken to render the guile or force of man impotent: the strength of the chilled-steel walls, the casing of electricity-resisting concrete, the stupendous isolation of the whole inner fabric on metal pillars so that the watchman, while inside the building, could walk above, below, and all round the outer walls of what was really—although it bore no actual ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... the feminine weak declension (Sec. 53), {[o]-}stems began in OHG. to be inflected after the analogy of the weak declension, especially in the plural. This process spread considerably in MHG. with concrete nouns, but not ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... universe to a point beyond which "specific creation" might not have commenced, or the divine fiat been put forth. To believe in the possibility of a rational synthesis, limited to sensible experience, or phenomenal facts within our reach, that shall climb from law to law, or from concrete fact to abstract conception, until it shall reach the Ultima Thule of all law, is to carry the faith of the scientist beyond the most transcendental belief of the theologian, and make him a greater dupe to his illusions than was ever cloistered in a monastery or affected ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... place all these activities have a common motive, which is preparation for a fuller life for the individual, not only in her personal but in her social relations. It is believed that both the habits formed and the concrete information acquired contribute to the girls being ready to meet intelligently most of the situations that are likely to arise in their later life. This concept is expressed in the girl scout's motto, ...
— Educational Work of the Girl Scouts • Louise Stevens Bryant
... 5, into the morning of August 6, 1914. But the fall of Fort Fleron began to tell in favor of the Germans. Belgian resistance perforce weakened. The ceaseless pounding of the German 8.4-inch howitzers smashed the inner concrete and stone protective armor of the forts, as if of little more avail than cardboard. At intervals on August 6, Forts Chaudfontaine, Evegnee and Barchon fell under the terrific hail of German shells. A way was now opened into the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... an organized, scientific supervision of children, made an appeal such as nothing else could. For, after all, persistently—almost irritatingly, at times—this great federation, which was supposed to concern itself with many fine abstractions, swung back to that concrete and essentially womanly idea of the care of children. Women who had brought to it high messages of art and education had known what it was to be exasperated into speechlessness by what they were pleased to denominate the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... from my researches appearing likely to prove fruitful, I resolved to apply them to the study of concrete instances, and was thus led to deal with the Psychology of Revolutions—notably that ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... specific details in any one of its divisions; it was possible only to set forth some of the more striking and significant facts which would demonstrate the nature and meaning of that department from which they were selected. The illustrations were usually made concrete through the use of photographs, which must naturally be lacking in the present volume. In preparing the addresses for publication, the verbal form of each evening's discussion has been somewhat changed, but there has been no substantial alteration of the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... take the moderate trouble of translating these words from the abstract into the concrete will need no further demonstration of the moral implications of this type of Monism. "There is no will"—not even the most brutalised or the most debauched—"that is not God's will." "Nothing can happen to any of God's children"—say, to the natives of the Congo or to a Jewish community ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and glow in you. I want you to dig into this commonplace, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... theosophist, and not a man of letters, or creative artist. He could not have written a song or a story or a play. Arnold complains of his want of concreteness. The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's, that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a moralizing discourse or sermon. For the clerical virus was strong in Emerson, and it was not for nothing that he was ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... marriage and the family to appropriate that high part of our energy that was meant for the service of his Father, the more impossible it becomes for us to believe that he was talking equally good sense when he so suddenly announced that he was himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh and blood were miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and slain in the traditional manner and would rise from the dead after three days; and that at his second coming the stars ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... certain interest in their needs and affairs. His practical knowledge was enormous. I think I have told you of the completeness of his arrangements—everything had been foreseen from grindstones to gas nippers. The same quality of concrete speculation showed him what we lacked in our ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Mrs. Brandon had not far to go. Before she arrived there a little conversation took place between the lady of the house, Miss Stiles, Miss Dobell and Dr. Puddifoot, that her presence would most certainly have hindered. Mrs. Combermere was once described by some one as "constructed in concrete"; and that was not a bad description of her, so solid, so square and so unshakable and unbeatable was she. She wore stiff white collars like a man's, broad thick boots, short skirts and a belt at her waist. Her ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... different light. Abner had got hold of the idea of limited partnership and had sought to apply it, in roundabout fashion, to the matrimonial relation. His treatment, far from suggesting an academic aloofness, was as concrete as characterization and conversation could make it; no one would have supposed, at first glance, that what chiefly moved him was a chaste abstract Platonic regard for the whole gentler sex. In short, people—such seemed to be his thesis—might very advantageously separate, and ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... was the philosophers had not more to say about the incongruity of people who had never had any trouble of their own sitting in judgment upon people who had known nothing but trouble. He was thinking also that abstract rules did not always fit smoothly over concrete cases, and that it was hard to make life a ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The image of the "presence" whatever it was, waiting there for him to go—this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short—he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... word, "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit,— "the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things to the desires ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... is one profession more than another in which devotion is implied and assumed, it is that of the doctor. It happens that on the morning when this chapter was drafted, I came upon the paragraph that follows; it seemed to me to supply just one striking concrete instance of how life is degraded by our present system, and to offer me a convenient text for a word or so more upon this question between gain and service. It is a little vague in its reference to Mr. Tompkins "of Birmingham," and I should ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... for the outside work we made a thorough study of soil composition and seed germination early in the winter. The children brought pieces of rock, pebbles, shells, wood, and leaves as concrete illustrations and with these before us ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... 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 ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... of Holland gin with 8 of olive oil, and stirr'd them well together. I then added 4 of nitric acid. A violent ebullition ensued. Nitrous oether, as I suppos'd, was generated, and in about four hours the oil became perfectly concrete, white ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey if I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man's thought and knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all angles and in all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are imbedded. They are all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none incompatible with any. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... was moving blindly across the wind with a thin trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor—thick white mist which seemed to ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... later two ambulances rolled out of the garage and took the four-mile winding ribbon of concrete which separated the Michaelville water impact range from the main front of the Aberdeen Proving Ground. On each ambulance was a hastily awakened and partially clothed medical officer. For three miles they tore along the curving road at ...
— Poisoned Air • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... used are concrete, granite, marble, and sandstone, any of which, on account of their durable character and the beauty that they lend to structures made from them, may be selected for building purposes, but inasmuch as they are rarely used in ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... hardly blame any one for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one hundred and twenty-five ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... household; his duty it was to receive strangers and see that they were properly looked after; so, after shaking hands with us furiously (he was a wonderful fellow to shake hands), he conducted us to our hut. It stood in a good-sized courtyard beautifully paved with a sort of concrete of limestone which looked very clean and white, and surrounded by a hedge of reeds and sticks tightly tied together, inside which ran a slightly raised bench, also made of limestone. The hut itself was neatly thatched, the thatch projecting ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... nomadic groups on border region with Yemen resist demarcation of boundary; Yemen protests Saudi erection of a concrete-filled pipe as a security barrier in 2004 to stem illegal cross-border activities in sections of the boundary; Kuwait and Saudi Arabia continue discussions on a maritime boundary with Iran; because the treaties have not been made public, the exact ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... extraordinarily sure on her feet, and, in any case, she 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 ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... 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
... table—Ditmar's children! Was Ditmar there? Impelled irresistibly by a curiosity overcoming repugnance and fear, she went forward slowly across the street, gained the farther pavement, stepped over the concrete coping, and stood, shivering violently, on the lawn, feeling like an interloper and a thief, yet held by morbid fascination. The children continued to romp. The boy was strong and swift, the girl stout and ungainly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and concrete work. I learned it by doing it. I followed concrete work for a long time. I've hoped to build several houses here in Pine Bluff and a lot ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... with one of Miss Twinkleton's young ladies (who knows nothing about it); and only the handmaidens flutter occasionally in the windows of the latter. It is noticed, by the bye, that these damsels become, within the limits of decorum, more skittish when thus intrusted with the concrete representation of their sex, than when dividing the representation with Miss Twinkleton's ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... that of a revelation of grace, in which God should justify the ungodly, Jew or Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those universal moral relations between Himself and man for which law is the compendious expression. It does not matter whether we suppose him to start from the concrete instance of the Jewish law, and to generalise on the basis of it; or to start from the universal conception of law, and to recognise in existing Jewish institutions the most available and definite ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... window of Mary's sitting room had been enlarged to glass doors, and from these a concrete path ran to the studio entrance. Mary planned to make it a covered way ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... want to know what's in it," Nancy insisted. "As long as I'm not in possession of any definite facts, I can ignore it. I've got the kind of mind that must deal with concrete facts concretely." ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... their significance, but that significance, he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity. Science was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a white man nineteen years—put all that concrete down out there. He is still living. He helps me a little sometimes. If it weren't for him I couldn't live. The government allows me and my wife together eight dollars a month. I asked for more, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... possesses in Daniel H. Williams, of Chicago, one of the really great surgeons of the country; that Edward H. Morris, a black man, is one of the most brilliant lawyers at the brilliant Cook County bar; that in every walk of life he has men and women who stand for something definite and concrete, and it seems to me that there can be little doubt that the race ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... himself all this; told it to others, too. But, now, the younger set, en masse and in detail, had become a little bit cramponne—a trifle too all-pervading. And it was because his regard for them, in the abstract, had become centred in a single concrete example that he began to find the younger set a nuisance. But others, it seemed, were quite as mad about Eileen Erroll as he was; and there seemed to be small chance for him to possess himself of her, unless he were prepared to make the matter of possession ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... assumptions has been so abundantly proved by experimental demonstrations, that every mind that is tolerably informed on the subject must be relieved of every shade of doubt respecting the greatly superior non-conducting powers which bodies consisting of separate atoms possess over those of a solid concrete nature. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... accomplish anything definite in this respect because of the vigorous opposition headed by Germany, the delegates turned their attention toward giving official recognition and concrete form to ideas which had already obtained in the settlement of international disputes, and toward the formation of a court before which the nations might have their differences adjudicated. The principles embodied in good offices and mediation and ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... knocked the necks of the bottles off against the concrete curbs, and drank. Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity. I hadn't. I still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all he could get—especially when it didn't cost anything. We shared our bottles with others, and drank ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... active, sense of that word,—should accept form, as well as give form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk a concrete illustration—among our American poets, Bryant, in the perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development, may be said to represent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears in the later, more protracted, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... and desire and power united find new ways for the exercise of strength. Up to now Stephen's inclination towards Leonard had been vague, nebulous; but now that theory showed a way to its utilisation it forthwith began to become, first definite, then concrete, then substantial. When once the idea had become a possibility, the mere passing of time did ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... like this, we must not deal so much with concrete cases as with drifts and curves. A couple of statistics are also necessary, especially if it is an alarming tendency that is being traced. The statistics ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... "prave 'orts" at the National Liberal Club the mildness of his criticism upon the Government's foreign policy sadly disappointed his more ardent supporters. His only concrete suggestion was that we should surrender our mandate for Mesopotamia and retire to the coast, and this did not meet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... These remarks will become concrete if the reader turns his eye to Figs. 5 and 6. The former represents a common type of planting of front yards. The bushes and trees are scattered promiscuously over the area. Such a yard has no purpose, no central idea. It shows plainly that the planter had no constructive ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... 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 it is a ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... lofty and melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of the difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn to the theme, and when it was too late to recede, he found himself baffled by the paradoxes which he encountered, and by the contradictions of a figure seen darkly through a mist of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... suspect 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... we are told, is full of incompletion, of broken destinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, of ambitions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, or a resultless play of influences. Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... other hand, heat being capable of rendering all these substances fluid, they may be, with the greatest simplicity, transported from one place to another; and they may be made to concrete altogether at the same time, and distinctly separate in any place. Hence, for the explanation of those natural appearances, which are so general, no further conditions are required, than the supposition of a sufficient intensity of subterraneous fire or heat, and a sufficient degree of compression ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... 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 Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... concrete, let us suppose that you are thinking of St. Paul's. Then, according to Meinong, we have to distinguish three elements which are necessarily combined in constituting the one thought. First, there is the act of thinking, which ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell |
