"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this: The enemy is on the defense. He is in a number-one, first-class trench. It is constructed with steel, concrete, and sandbags. It has all the improvements that science can devise. Your business is to attack and crush the enemy. How can you advance over exposed ground against such a position? The man behind all those modern improvements has got ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... finally edged her Renault up on the "on" ramp and the freeway stretched straight and unobstructed ahead, she stepped down on the accelerator and watched the needle climb up and past the legal 65-mile limit. The sound of her tires on the smooth concrete was soothing and the rush of wind outside gave the morning an illusion of coolness. She edged away from the tangle of cars that had pulled onto the freeway with her and momentarily was alone on the road, with her rear-view mirror ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... mechanical and intellectual devices as meet its needs at a particular period of its existence. It clothes and enriches itself with such new customs, habits, and cultural forms as it is able, or permitted to use. It puts into these relatively external things, moreover, such concrete meanings as its changing experience and its unchanging ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... ever-blessed something beyond them and including them,—that all our ideas, in all their series, converge to one central idea, in which they find their explanation. The formal fact of thinking is what constitutes our being; but this thought leads us back, when we consider its concrete contents, to the necessary pre-supposition on which our ideas depend, the permanent cause on which they and we as conscious beings depend. We have therefore the idea of an infinite, perfect and all-powerful being—an idea which cannot be the creation of ourselves, and must be given by some being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... fashioning of their contour and color. As soon as this underlying uniformity of make is recognized it may be seen to be the coloring and relief belonging to any sort of poetic material, whether ordinarily accounted dramatic material or not, which is imaginatively externalized and made concrete. This peculiarity of make Browning early acknowledged in his estimate of his shorter poems as characteristic of his touch, when he called his lyrics and romances dramatic. He became consciously sensitive later to slight variations effected by his manipulation ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... The bank-barn was forty feet high. On its lee side, Aaron had nailed thin, horizontal strips of wood about a foot apart, hoping to encourage the mud-daubing birds he'd seen on the wall at Datura to plaster their nests onto his barn, and shop for insects in his fields. Lacking concrete, he'd constructed a roofless stone hut abutting the barn to serve as his manure shed. The farmhouse itself was a bit gay, having an inside toilet to cheat the Murnan winters and a sunporch for Martha's bacteriological equipment. As the nearest Amish Volle ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... people distinguished in letters, art, and travel who have visited the town of late years; and No. 9, Pleasant Row, the birthplace of Lord Armstrong, which has only recently been destroyed to make way for the N.E.R. Company's new ferro-concrete Goods Station ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... especially of its gradual absorption of the French language after the Norman Conquest. It is this dual character, this combination of native and foreign, of innate and exotic elements, which accounts for the wealth of our English language and literature. To see it in concrete form, we should read in succession Beowulf and Paradise Lost, the two great epics which show the root and the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... he had studied the campaigns of the great Corsican in order to discover the principles on which military success is based; that having studied and reflected on those principles, and the effect their application produced, in numerous concrete cases, they became so firmly imbedded in his mind as to be ever present, guiding him into the right path, or warning him against the wrong, whenever he had to deal with a strategic ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... double meaning. "It is a privilege to hear you say so. I shall recall the fact to her Majesty's Government in the report I shall make upon my tour of the province. I have a feeling that the Queen's pleasure in the devotion of her distinguished French subjects may take some concrete form." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as a packet of seed. In reality it is not nearly so much trouble as it sounds, and then, too, this is for the first season only, a well built frame lasting for years—forever, if you want to take a little more time and make it of concrete ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... Oh, you mean the mailbox!" Whedbee walked across the street to the square green box with the rounded metal top. Another of the globes had been attached to the mailbox, and the legs had been burned loose from the concrete sidewalk. Confidently, Whedbee lifted the light object, carried it to the truck, ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... storms of 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 fraud to truth, and from ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... your perch!" said the other man, who wore glasses. "Your premises won't come out in the wash. You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag. You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it. You quote Marx and Hyndman and Kautsky—what are they?—shines! ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... and evening in transcribing words into my "Ojibwa Vocabulary." This is a labor requiring great caution. The language is so concrete, that often, when I have supposed a word had been dissected and traced to its root, subsequent attention has proved it to be a compound. Thus verbs have been inserted with pronouns, or with particles, indicating ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... not seen the slightest effect his "Missionary Work" was having on the stolid Thor, was in despair; but he did not know the truth. As Hicks had once said, "You don't know nothing what goes on in Thor's dome. There's a wall of solid concrete around the machinery of his mind, and you can't see the wheels, belts, and cogs ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... act on the previous night. Yes; he had not imposed on her for a moment; and she perceived clearly now that murder had been in his heart. She was not appalled nor desolated. She thought: 'So that is murder, that little thing, that thing over in a minute!' It appeared to her that murder in the concrete was less dreadful than murder in the abstract, far less horrible than the strident sound of the word on the lips of a newsboy, or the look of it in the 'Signal.' She felt dimly that she ought to be shocked, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... and altogether purifying and ennobling his mind. This Anaxagoras was called Nous, or Intelligence, by the men of that day, either because they admired his own intellect, or because he taught that an abstract intelligence is to be traced in all the concrete forms of matter, and that to this, and not to chance, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... thoughts developing and following on one another's heels in Diana's mind. But in my head there was nothing concrete enough to call a "thought." Feelings seemed to have raced upstairs from heart to brain, and driven ideas out of the house. They ran wildly round and round, saying to each other, "What if I never see him again? What if he should be killed?" But while we were in this state, Mrs. Kilburn ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... shatters much loveliness; but a pretty girl who looks pretty outdoors on a dazzling hot summer morning is prettier then than ever. Cora knew it; of course she knew it; she knew exactly how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as a picture—the white-domed parasol, with its cheerful pale-green lining, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... on the little eyes as he had rendered them. He saw the faults in the drawing hardly at all, and his pain softened and almost ceased when he took up the violin, but when he put it down the flow of subjective emotion ceased, and he stared on the concrete and realistic image of his thought—Maggie passing through the shade with ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... to which we especially strove to give expression, through these laws and through executive action, was that a right is valueless unless reduced from the abstract to the concrete. This sounds like a truism. So far from being such, the effort practically to apply it was almost revolutionary, and gave rise to the bitterest denunciation of us by all the big lawyers, and all the big newspaper editors, who, whether sincerely or for ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... delivered fresh and dry every year. Very early, indeed, there was a light-tower in our own land, on the cliff at Dover, relics of which may even now be seen. It was built by the Romans, of very strong material, tufa, concrete, and red-tile brick. It was probably used as a lighthouse about the time of the Norman conquest, and is now devoted to purposes of government storage. The Colossus of Rhodes is said to have been used as a beacon, but there is no ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... to his laboratory he pretended to read the news, but could not succeed in interesting himself in the wars and famines of the world, so much more vital and absorbing were his own passions and retreats, so filmy was the abstract, so concrete and vital the particular. A million children might be starving in India, a thousand virgins about to be sold to slavery in Turkestan; but such intelligence counted little to a man struggling with doubt of the woman he loves, and questioning further the right ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... things in every grade below them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is always water, for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the mountains—there is not much rainfall—and carried in little concrete channels along the road—side from village to village, something like those conduits the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the Maritime Alps to their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle of it the whole night long, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... journalism, science, religion, the advantages to be had by royal marriages, by the elevation of German princes to the thrones of the lesser states, had all been calculated with as much care and precision as the choice of sites in foreign countries for the erection of concrete emplacements for their monster guns. No detail seemed too trivial for the bestowal of conscientious labour, if it promised a possible return. When in doubt whether it was worth while to make an effort for some object of no immediate interest to the Fatherland the German invariably decided that the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a concrete base— That's Pep! Friendly smile on an honest face— That's Pep! The spirit that helps when another's down, That knows how to scatter the blackest frown, That loves its neighbor, and loves its town— ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... want of party zeal on the part of his own leader, Mr. Gresham. He did not dare to say this, lest, when the house door should at last be opened, he might not be invited to enter with the others; but such was his conviction. "If we were all a little less in the abstract, and a little more in the concrete, it would be better for us." Laurence Fitzgibbon, when these words had been whispered to him by Mr. Bonteen, had hardly understood them; but it had been explained to him that his friend had meant "men, not measures." When Parliament met, Mr. Gresham, the leader of the Liberal party, had not ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... have formulated useful principles also, but in an imperishable style, in a more concrete and at the same ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... readily comprehended and supplied, that we can hardly blame any one for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one hundred and twenty-five pages of her own work ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 Others. Conditions Favorable ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... pouring in a little hot water critically from time to time in order to make the butter come. This exercise may be recommended as an admirable corrective to foolish flights of imagination. There is something concrete about butter-making which counteracts an overplus of sentiment— especially when the butter will not come. And hot water ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... is firmly fixed in the ground a heavy ball is suspended by means of a rope fastened to the top of the pole. Two flat pieces of stone or concrete are placed on opposite sides of the pole. The game is played with nine-pins, which are set up on one stone, the player standing on the other and endeavouring by hurling the ball to strike down a maximum number of pins. Usually he has three ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... 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 a tantrum ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... The abstract is so much more entertaining than the concrete. It affords opportunities for generalisation, which is the ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... house it was, full of unexpected angles and doors, and having a garden and orchard which straggled up the lower slope of one of the Downs. It had a stable, too, of a modest sort, and rather poky, but the coach-house was admirable, light, airy, facing south-east, and having a new concrete floor, which the Master helped to lay with his own hands. The back half of this coach-house consisted of a slightly raised wooden dais; a very pleasant place for a Wolfhound to lie, when spring sunshine was flooding the coach-house. But Tara did not spend much of her ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... is like a haunted animal from the cradle to the grave, the victim of real or imaginary fears, not only his own, but those reflected upon him from the superstitions, self-deceptions, sensory illusions, false beliefs, and concrete errors of the whole ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... chilled and saddened me by the sharp demand it seemed to make for the laying aside of calm reflection or cheerful conversation, and the taking up of stern realities, practical considerations—the hard, concrete facts of daily life. The outlines of the huddled houses, the moving lights of thronged streets, the Town— It seemed to grip me ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... enhanced delight this door led into the library. Gladly would I have lingered, but Mrs Wilson walked on, and I followed through rooms and rooms, low-pitched, and hung with tapestry, some carpeted, some floored with black polished oak, others with some kind of cement or concrete, all filled with ancient furniture whose very aspect was a speechless marvel. Out of one into another, along endless passages, up and down winding stairs, now looking from the summit of a lofty tower upon terraces and gardens below—now lost in gloomy ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... precipitous, by the unceasing lash of the southern ocean. The upper surface of this country, like that of all we had passed through lately, consisted of a calcareous oolitic limestone, below which was a hard concrete substance of sand or of reddish soil, mixed with shells and pebbles; below this again, the principal portion of the cliff consisted of a very hard and coarse grey limestone, and under this a narrow belt of a whitish or cream-coloured substance, lying in horizontal ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... assistant, the farm manager and half a dozen hands. The partners themselves slept in a tent. There was also a cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well diggers who were working on the new buildings. They drove out in Fords from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn't go home till after supper. The wagon shed of the old horse barn served ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the fire itself had been a legacy from the earliest tribes; but it remained for the Rosicrucians and the fire philosophers of the Sixteenth Century under the lead of Paracelsus to establish a concrete religious belief on that basis, finding in the Scriptures what seemed to them ample proof that fire was the symbol of the actual presence of God, as in all cases where He is said to have visited this earth. He came either ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... and the same is in a measure true of it to-day, was rather a bundle of provinces, some of which owned scarcely a nominal allegiance to the ruler in Cabul, than a concrete state. Herat and Candahar were wholly independent, the Ghilzai tribes inhabiting the wide tracts from the Suliman ranges westward beyond the road through Ghuznee, between Candahar and Cabul, and northward into the rugged country between ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc. The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and unnumbered sufferings of the people, were in her instinctive and inborn, as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... when his 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 except my own. It is very exasperating to me to go to my bookcase and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... came to the turnpike, Barnes had reduced his hundred and one suppositions to the following concrete conclusion: Green Fancy was no longer in the hands of its original owner for the good and sufficient reason that Mr. Curtis was dead. The real master of the house was the man known as Loeb. Through O'Dowd he had leased the property from the widowed daughter-in-law, ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... another danger. Although the palace itself was stone-built, its gilded domes and ornamental turrets were of timber, and therefore liable to be fired, as indeed had already happened. The roof also was of ancient cedar beams, thinly covered with concrete, while the interior containing an enormous quantity of panels, or rather boarding, cut ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... draws near to its end the thought of my book grows more and more dear to me. How I will get it published I know not; but I will. Then even if it doesn't sell, even if nobody reads it, I will be content. Out of this brief, perishable Me I will have made something concrete, something that will preserve my thought within its dusty covers long after I am dead ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... us be more concrete. Lay before the lady a complete case: describe your man, then I'll describe MINE, and Miss Flora ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... children and an income of 25s. An income of L1 a week is not even mentioned, though many a London school-girl must know "in the last three years of her school-life" that her mother has not more than this to spend. Translated into concrete quantities of food, clothing, and rent, this "living wage" is found insufficient for daily needs. The teacher therefore is encouraged to ignore the economic conditions of most of ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... by its absolute emptiness of content, does not afford any means in itself of progression; somehow and somewhere a principle of movement, of development, of concrete reality, must be found or assumed, to link this ultimate abstraction of existence to the multifarious phenomena {12} of existence as known. And it was, perhaps, because Anaximander failed to work out this aspect of the question, that in the subsequent leaders of the school ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... naturally slight; some, indeed, incline rather to the essay than to the story, but each has that enthralling interest which justifies its existence. Coppee possesses preeminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction. A sketch, for instance, is the first tale written by him, 'Une Idylle pendant le Seige' (1875). In a novel we require strong characterization, great grasp of character, and the novelist ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was keeping her from rapid physical degeneration. Yet, like all northern American summers, the weather became fearfully hot in July and August, and the half-mile even in early morning and at six in the evening left her listless, nervously dreading the great concrete-lined room, the reek of glue and oil, the sweaty propinquity of her neighbours, and the monotonous appetite of the sprawling machine which she fed all day long ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... responsibilities toward humanity and the affairs of other nations, races, and peoples of this globe, which is round—those responsibilities handed down to us by the father of our country, George Washington—interpret as meaning that we wish freedom of the seas. Not in the abstract, but in the concrete, not in modicum but in unconditional unobstruction and under such international statutes and regulations as shall confine sea spaces to neither the individual, to the group, to those who live within certain prescribed boundaries which constitute government by the people for the people ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... such buttons. The concealed lighting that spilled from the huge bowl under the ceiling revealed a sleeping-porch, three sides of which were fine-meshed copper screen. The fourth side was the house wall, solid concrete, through which ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... of rawness in the picture, a hint of incompleteness, with a promise of much to come. Sage Butte was, perhaps, a trifle barbarous; but its crude frame buildings would some day give place to more imposing piles of concrete and steel. Its inhabitants were passing through a transition stage, showing signs at times of the primitive strain, but, as a rule, reaching out eagerly toward what was new and better. They would make swift progress, and even now he liked the strenuous, optimistic, and somewhat ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... She could not help thinking of Capes. Surely Capes was different. Capes looked at one and not over one, spoke to one, treated one as a visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her, cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little things, almost impalpable, had happened ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... enjoy pictorial representation of human life with living actors and audible words; and, understanding this, many good people have had the hope that the stage might be purified and made a teacher of morals. Certainly valuable lessons of life might be most strongly presented in this concrete form, and thus appeal with wonderful power to the young and inexperienced. But that it might be so used does not insure that it will be, and observation shows us that it ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... adhere to the so-called "philosophy of force," would answer without hesitation that the side which won was, ipso facto, the better side. But such a judgment is based on numerous fallacies, and can not be indorsed in the sweeping way it is uttered. Take a concrete example: ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Garrison's morality suffered. It is so easy for the well-fed to be honest. But when there is the hunger cancer gnawing at one's vitals, not for one day, but for many, then honesty and dishonesty cease to be concrete realities. It is not a question of piling up luxuries, but of supplying ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... greater than all gods."[27] But this is not the quasi-monotheism of the Hindu, to whom the other gods were real and potent factors, individually distinct from the one supreme god, who represents the All-god, but is at once abstract and concrete. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 more concrete and detailed problems of method would not be serious if every child's mind were a blank or even if its instincts were analogous to normal animals. But neither is the case, and the problem of method and means of instruction is therefore amazingly complicated. If the sex life ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... undoubtedly furnishes products most nearly resembling the natural floral odours, and is the only one which does not destroy the delicate fragrance of the violet and jasmine. The yield, however, is extremely small, and concrete perfumes prepared in this way are therefore ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... Chinese pagoda expresses the same idea. He says that Kheen or Shang-te, the Chinese deities of sex, are also worshipped in the form of serpents, of which the dragon of the Chinese is a modification. This furnishes a concrete instance in which the mound of earth is of phallic significance, and substantiates an interpretation of serpent worship to which we shall ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... hopeless! hopeless!" cried the Waters, descending open- palmed upon the Wheel "There is nothing between here and Raven's Gill Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of concrete could not remove; and ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... life. Asked what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, "The imaginative intellect." He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had nothing to do. He would stand wrapped in the delight of what he counted its beauty, and yet more in the delight that his was the ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... they had known and touched. The joy was too great for them, since the very idea itself came to them as a freedom—a freedom from the sense of their measureless insignificance. It was the first time, I repeat, when the individual, as a man, felt in himself the Infinite made concrete. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... miracle is rich in symbolism and suggestion. By what law or principle the effect of gravitation was superseded, so that a human body could be supported upon the watery surface, man is unable to affirm. The phenomenon is a concrete demonstration of the great truth that faith is a principle of power, whereby natural forces may be conditioned and controlled.[722] Into every adult human life come experiences like unto the battling of the storm-tossed voyagers with ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... must have been a time when there was no London, but you cannot think it any more than you can think the time when there shall be none. I make so sure of these reflections that I hope there was no mistake about those modest breadths of Roman masonry; its rubble laid in concrete, was strong enough to support the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... figure—the so-called Protestant world has been gradually sliding down hill ever since the Reformation. The great majority of men are not willing to turn good, to renounce the material and sensual rewards under their hands without some definite and concrete guaranty that, if they do so, they are going, to be rewarded hereafter. They demand some sort of infallibility. And when we let go of the infallibility of the Church, we began to slide toward what looked like a bottomless pit, and we clutched at the infallibility ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with which women normally regard their husbands—a contempt grounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To this primary sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a concrete comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the fact that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the typical husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it than his wife. He is, taking averages, one who has been loved, as the saying goes, by but one ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... he must make a connection with it through the lower mental and astral worlds. When he wishes to descend he draws around himself a veil of the matter of the lower mental world, which we call his mental body. This is the instrument by means of which he thinks all his concrete thoughts—abstract thought being a power of the ego himself in the higher ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... that Watt is to be credited, but also for the manual ability displayed in giving to these "airy nothings of the brain, a local habitation and a name," for his greatest idea might have remained an "airy nothing," had he not been also the mechanician able to produce it in the concrete. It is not, therefore, only Watt the inventor, Watt the discoverer, but also Watt, the manual worker, that stands forth. As we shall see later on, he created a new type of workmen capable of executing his plans, working with, and educating them often with his own hands. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... of missionaries representing all Protestant denominations as to their practice and convictions regarding this subject. Seventy-three answered and Dr. Bergen tabulated their replies. As to the results of the concrete cases of intervention cited, fifty-three are reported to have been beneficial, twenty-six are characterized as doubtful, four as mixed and sixty-seven as bad. This leaves the remaining cases "suspended in the air,'' ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... which our ancestors (I wonder that I was allowed any ancestors: why wasn't I created at once out of some stray scrap of protoplasm?) were supposed to have held in the colonial period. As I gazed upon Washington Flagg I thrilled with the sense that I was gazing upon the materialization in a concrete form of all the ghostly brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces which I had ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the Social System, p. 91), "But now that statistics have made such great progress, and the comparison between the population and the means of subsistence in a fixed period of time is no longer based upon hypothesis, but upon concrete and certain data in a science of observation it is no longer possible to give the name of law to a theory like that of Malthus, which is a complete disagreement with facts. As our century has been free from the wars, pestilences and famines ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... scream and the screech of rubber on concrete knifed through two seconds of time before snapping, like a celery stalk of sound, into aching silence. The silence of limbo, called into being for the space of a slow heartbeat. Then the thud of running feet, the rising hubbub of ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... and the sea and of men until, aware that the company had risen, we rose also, and donning hats and coats, set forth, talking still. Together we paced beside docks and along piers that stretched away by the mile, massive structures of granite and concrete, which had only come into being, so he ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... which is so much more ethereal than the physical one—may be made to harden its particles to the atmospheric changes. The whole secret is to succeed in evolving it out, and separating it from the visible; and while its generally invisible atoms proceed to concrete themselves into a compact mass, to gradually get rid of the old particles of our visible frame so as to make them die and disappear before the new set has had time to evolve and replace them. We can say no more. The ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... all about that," said King Philip; "I did not send for you to get you off upon those rails, which have nothing whatever to do with thruppenny bits. Be concrete, I pray you, good Aristotle," he continued, and yawned. "Stick to things as they are, and do not make me remind you how once you said that men had thirty-six, women only thirty-four, teeth. Do not wander ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the fever in his veins mounted daily as he saw his dream assuming concrete form. The many problems arising as the work advanced afforded him unceasing activity; the unforeseen obstacles which were encountered hourly required swift and certain judgment, taxing his ingenuity to the utmost. He became so filled with it all, so steeped with the spirit ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... these were the means for the conversion of the Gentiles, and that he had quite another gospel for the enlightened portion of the community. They could not see that among heathens used to apotheosis, man-worship, and plastic gods, ideas, to become effective, must put on concrete and tangible bodies. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the cellar. Like all true householders, Roger was fond of his cellar. It was something mouldy of smell, but it harboured a well-stocked little bin of liquors, and the florid glow of the furnace mouth upon the concrete floor was a great pleasure to the bookseller. He loved to peer in at the dancing flicker of small blue flames that played above the ruddy mound of coals in the firebox—tenuous, airy little flames that were as blue as violets and hovered up and down ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Mrs. Forrester returned, and now with trenchancy, the concrete case being easier to deal with openly. "No; I have not seen him; but Mercedes spoke to me about him last winter, when she hoped for the match, and told me, moreover, that she was surprised by Karen's refusal, as the child was much attached to him. I have not seen him; but I know ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... his seat. He rubbed his eyes, quite unnecessarily, for they were now used to the dim starlight. No possible doubt existed—the ominous black figure was there! Straight and tall, it stood, exactly as he remembered seeing it at the head of the trail. Now it was on a concrete path that bisected the kitchen garden, motionless, apparently inspecting the darkened house of ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the introduction to "The Best Short Stories of 1916," I pointed out that the American short story cannot be reduced to a literary formula, because the art in which it finds its concrete embodiment is a growing art. The critic, when he approaches American literature, cannot regard it as he can regard any foreign literature. Setting aside the question of whether our cosmopolitan population, with its widely different kinds of racial heritage, is at an advantage ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding. One was that the truth which often is stranger than fiction may also on occasion be a more dangerous commodity to handle. Another ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... split like a banana peel opening up. It hardly seemed as if a bolt of lightning could have caused it. We climbed over the broken pieces to look inside. It was still warm in there. At least six hours after lightning—or whatever had struck it, the concrete was still warm. The bottom and several feet of the sides of the silo were covered with ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... particular important point. A girl must not be expected to give these matters the serious consideration they merit unless she thoroughly understands the reasons why. An explanation, in the form of even an intelligent talk, will soon be forgotten. If, however, a definite, concrete picture, is impressed upon her; if she actually sees in her mind the process that is going on, she will understand why it is necessary to do as she is told. If the mother will therefore assure herself that the daughter actually knows what is being accomplished ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... who wrote himself "esquire," that the utmost chivalrous reverence was due to the ladies as an abstract idea; but this abstract idea was quite compatible with the rudest behaviour and the supremest contempt for any given woman in the concrete. Woman was an article of which there were two qualities: the first-class thing was a toy, the second was a machine. Both were for the use of man—which was true enough, had they only realised that it meant for man's real help and improvement, ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... faculties—but that Memory is a Physiological and Psychological property of each mental act, and that such act retains the traces and history of its own action, and that there are as many memories as there are kinds of mental action, and that, therefore, Memory is always concrete, although, for convenience sake, we do speak of it in the abstract, and that consequently all Memory improvement means improvement of the Action or Manner of action of the Mental powers, and that what he imparts is the right way to USE the Intellect ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... natural science in the sixteenth century brought the possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit—in the embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober naturalists there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who had at least ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... needed a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape, magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet now spread ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... must ignore whose toes are trodden upon, whose feelings are hurt, whose happiness is apparently marred. For note this: if a man does fearlessly the right thing, I am convinced that in the readjustment all these conflicting interests find themselves bettered instead of injured. You want a concrete instance? I believe firmly that if the general had kept to his army life, and made his wife conform to it, after the storm had passed she would have settled down to a happy existence. I ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... concrete applications. She is your only true pragmatist. If a philosophy will not work, says she, why bother ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... view, and the eye never wearies of their infinite variety. Nor are the tints less remarkable than the forms. When the light of day warms them with its gorgeous glaze, the buildings wear the brightest hues of red concrete, like a certain house near Prince's Gate, set off by lambent lights of lively pink and balas-ruby, and by shades of deep transparent purple, while here and there a dwarf dome or a tumulus gleams sparkling white in the hot sun-ray. The even-glow is indescribably lovely, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... many animals, large and small, all of which fled precipitately—and she rounded a sharp bend in the stream, to be confronted with a sight which must have been strange indeed to her. Stretching across the river was—a network of rusty wire, THE REMAINS OF A REINFORCED CONCRETE BRIDGE. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... There is concrete evidence that the United States is as well advanced as any other nation in guided-missile development. Certain recent advances should place us in the lead, unless confidential reports on Soviet ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... If the reader would see this in concrete form, let him read a paragraph of Milton's prose, or a stanza of his poetry, and compare its exuberant, melodious diction with Dryden's concise method ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... king himself after all his magnificent boasts, was obliged to make his escape through a distinction which he framed between a king in abstracto and a king in concreto: an abstract king, he said, had all power; but a concrete king was bound to observe the laws of the country which he governed. King James's Works, p. 533. But how bound? by conscience only? or might his subjects resist him, and defend their privileges? This he thought not fit to explain. And so difficult is it to explain that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... phase of realisation and clarification. All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world about me. It was evident that many men no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had raised themselves to influential ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... personification. There is nothing mysterious about the process; the leader does not "embody" a previously conceived idea, rather he begets it. From his personality springs the personification. The abstract idea arises from the only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete fact. Without perception there is no conception. We noted in speaking of dances (p. 43) how the dance got generalized; how from many commemorations of actual hunts and battles there arose the hunt dance and ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... is getting on well. All the Hospital tents are pitched, and all the quarters except the Sisters and the big store tents for the Administration block are ready. The operating theatre tent is to have a concrete ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... solidity. My opinion then is, that truth is not reasonably the main and ultimate object of philosophy; but that philosophy should seek truth merely as the means of acquiring and of propagating happiness. Truths are simple; wisdom, which is formed by their apposition and application, is concrete: out of this, in its vast varieties, open to our wants and wishes, comes happiness. But the knowledge of all the truths ever yet discovered does not lead immediately to it, nor indeed will ever reach it, unless ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Boston on Jefferson's birthday. He avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the principles of Jefferson "the definitions and axioms of free society." Without conditions he identified his own cause with the cause of Jefferson, "the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... MacDaniels asked for concrete evidence. He wanted to know where there was an orchard with 20-year-old grafted Chinese chestnut trees. They haven't been planted that long, but I would like to give him concrete evidence in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... 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 ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... purpose has been "not to carry out in the approved style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents or courtesies—all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included—to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson |
