"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night of August 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 city, though, for the most part, still contested by Belgian infantry. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... out a spaceship in my mind, a bullet-shaped affair with a huge rubber ball on its end, gyroscopes to keep it oriented properly, the ball serving as solution to that biggest of missile-engineering problems, excess heat. You'd build a huge concrete launching field, supported all the way down to bedrock, hop in the ship and start bouncing. Of course it would be kind of a ...
— The Big Bounce • Walter S. Tevis
... already begun work on the great central forest avenue stretching straight away for four miles between green jungles topped by giant oaks, magnolias, and palmettos; lesser drives and chair trails were being planned, blazed, and traced out; sample coquina concrete blocks had been delivered, and a rickety narrow-gauge railroad was now being installed with spidery branches reaching out through the monotonous flat woods and creeping around the boundaries where a nine-foot game-proof ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... accurately, but also a total ignorance of many other words, and an inability to use them at all; and these last are, as a rule, the very words which are absolutely necessary for the comprehension and expression of any thought that deals with something more than the most ordinary concrete notions. There is also a very common inability to appreciate the differences between words that are at all similar. Lastly, where the pupil has studied Latin, and trusts too much for his knowledge of English ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... the future? It is with the whole problem of history that we are confronted in these practical hours. At heart our problem is that of the place of man in nature as a conscious factor of progress. This is a problem, finally, of the philosophy of history, but it is rather in a more concrete way and upon a different level that it is to be considered here,—and somewhat incidentally to other more specific questions. But this is the problem that is always before us, and the one to which this study aims to make ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... little but shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find the point again, this Speaking One; and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy: for there is need of him yet! The Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete practical exemplar: this, with all our Writing and Printing Functions, has a perennial place. Could he but find the point again,—take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, and soul-devouring, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction. A personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social. Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her characters. She paints nature less in its own ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... hadn't built those baths we should probably not have the glorious Pennsylvania station in New York, that some of the architectural authorities consider the most important building of its kind built in this country. Although the work here is all concrete, Clarence Ward, the architect, says that with care, it could last hundreds ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... similar need in the case of mountains. Besides the bare statement of figures, it is necessary to have some means for grasping the meaning of the figures. The bare tens and thousands must be clothed with some concrete images. The statement that a mountain is 15,000 feet high is, by itself, little more impressive, than that it is 3,000; we want something more before we can mentally compare Mont Blanc and Snowdon. Indeed, the same people who guess of a mountain's ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 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 become to ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... like that," said Rose. "At present, I am quite amusing myself. And it seems to me there are many different kinds of life here. You have only to take your choice, just as you do in other places, only here it's curiously concentrated and concrete." ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... what he means by that," Bonamy sighed. For as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... he was going, gained courage to say,— 'At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to 't as any one else.' 1150 'Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,' Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, 'The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss Is only in taking a great busy nation For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.— But there comes Miranda, Zeus! where shall I flee to? She has such a penchant for bothering me too! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... translate her triumph into more concrete speech. The essential lesson of experience, then, is that no device, plan, or policy adopted by England for the subjugation of Ireland has ever been anything except an abject failure. And the positive of this negative is that every claim that ever formed part ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... annihilate the Wick salient or some such target, one of our heaviest of heavy trench mortars dropped short (perhaps that is too much of a compliment to the particular shot) in our trenches near a company headquarters and almost upon a new concrete refuge, which the R.E. had just completed and not yet shown to the Brigadier. Though sometimes supplied, the co-operation of this arm was ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... I need a resolute man to aid me in the one purpose of my life! I wish to go out to India to face this Hugh Fraser, to lift up the curtain of the dead past, and I need a protector—a paid champion—a man who values the only thing which is concrete power in life; a man who knows the power of money! For, gold is ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... Germans before the British had surged forward all along this line in the April battle. Their old trenches, abandoned now, ran like deep fissures through the soil. They had been pretty well blasted to pieces by the British bombardment, but a good many of their deep, concrete dugouts had survived. These were not being used by the British here, but were saved in good repair as show places, and the officers who were our guides took us down into ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... not deceive myself. Above and beyond this spiritual inclination that draws me to Pepita, is the love of the Infinite and of the Eternal. Although I represent Pepita to myself as an idea, as a poem, it is still the idea, the poetry of something finite, limited, concrete; while the love of God and the conception of God embrace everything. But, notwithstanding all my efforts, I am unable to give form in my mind to this supreme conception—this object of the highest love—in order that ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... perhaps 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, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... and the reverence paid by man. Thus Jupiter and Juno are the abstractions of manhood and womanhood; Dea Dia or Ceres, the creative power; Minerva, the power of memory; Dea Bona, or among the Samnites Dea Cupra, the good deity. While to the Greek everything assumed a concrete and corporeal shape, the Roman could only make use of abstract, completely transparent formulae; and while the Greek for the most part threw aside the old legendary treasures of primitive times, because they ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that staid jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid April—something like a cataclysm! ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... in reality, the most successful avenue by which he may obtain the theory, for he learns the abstract more readily from concrete examples. ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... get Mr. Fenwick to hunt up the address, and go and call on the Beazleys." This sudden assumption of a concrete form by the family was due to a vivid image that filled Sally's active brain immediately of a household of parched women presided over by a dried man who owned a wig on a stand and knew what chaff-wax ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... these warehouses or back-streets. I 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
... houses are constructed with a layer of concrete over the whole area of the site, and a portion of the garden at back. Every room is specially ventilated, and all party walls are hollow in order to prevent the passage of sound. A constant water supply is laid on, there being no cisterns but those to the water-waste preventers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... of thought, of discovery, of direction and of accumulation to whose abilities and activities all human progress is due, and I cannot hear without indignation suggestions from his own would-be leaders which impair his self-respect. I wish, for a concrete example, that the workingman should pay his poll tax and contribute to his occupational insurance with the rest of us, not to relieve Capital of a burden, but that the character of the working man himself may be strengthened by a conscious ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... yet I do not expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the 'no' of it. It is more hard still to accept so sad a concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. Tonight I go to prove it. ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... time that, in strictness, they separate from the religious bodies around them, only because they know of a purer or a happier religion" (p. 126). It is useful to turn, from time to time, from the abstract to the concrete, in order to steady and purge our mental vision. Let us therefore, in passing, gaze upon Theophile Gautier, the high priest of the pride of human form, whose unspeakably impure romance has been pronounced by Mr. Swinburne to be "the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... records; and various theories have been put forward, not the least astonishing being the supposition that Simon was an alias for Paul, and that the Simon and Peter in the accounts of the fathers and in the narrative of the legends were simply concrete symbols to represent the two sides of the ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... it—a lulling power—like that of the monotonous organ-music, which Holland, Catholic or not, still so greatly loves. But what he could not away with in the Catholic religion was its unfailing drift towards the concrete—the positive imageries of a faith, so richly beset with persons, things, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... new land is a fragment of the old—why does it not retain its old formation? What has become of the granite and the calcareous deposits? How is it that these should all be changed into a mineral concrete with which we have ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... does not afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life, according to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic; but according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and credulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate the individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary to declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh. In Italy, the mind seems to be raised ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... I, 'let us be more concrete. Lay before the lady a complete case: describe your man, then I'll describe MINE, and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however, we should not speak in generalities, but bring before the child's mind concrete examples of his own objectionable acts from recent experience. It is useless to tell John how important it is to be punctual and let it go at that; it is not enough even to tell him that he often fails to be on time. If you can remind ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... 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 contrary winds and threatening seas; ofttimes the night ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the traditional road of European painting. It was in what he saw that he discovered a sublime architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular. He pushed further and further towards a complete revelation of the significance of form, but he needed something concrete as a point of departure. It was because Cezanne could come at reality only through what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms. Few great artists have depended more on the model. Every picture carried him a little further towards his goal—complete ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... 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. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... be made of concrete evidences of the natural antipathy that the present German autocracy has for successful democracy and hence for us. A new instance has just come to me. My son, Arthur, who succeeded to most of my activities at home, has ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... "To be concrete, unfortunately, I cannot do so," the Russian said. "I must speak of this lady we are both interested in—pray, try to listen to me calmly, sir, for we are here for the settling of a matter which concerns the ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... snowstorm at Christmas time in the great city is the child's true joy. At their opposite neighbor's a faint light was visible in the balcony room; the wet soft flakes had already ridged the balustrade, powdered the dwarf evergreens, topped the cap of the electric arc-light and laid upon the concrete a coverlet of ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... concrete, the union, the result rather of a union of so many nationalities, ought surely to do its share towards this expression. The American people surely represents the century,—has much of its spirit: is full of unrest; is eminently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... two movements. One might as well compare Darwinism and Socialism in our own time. The one was a new way of looking at things, a fresh {188} intellectual start, without definite program or organization. The other was primarily a thesis: a set of tenets the object of which was concrete action. The Reformation began in France as a school of thought, but it soon grew to a political party and a new church, and finally it evolved into a ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Putnam came under the influence of Professor Louis Agassiz and was for several years an assistant in the laboratory of that distinguished scientist. It seems likely that this was the source of Professor Putnam's faith and enthusiasm for the accumulation and preservation of concrete data. As his interest in anthropology grew, he seems to have sought to bring together in the Peabody Museum a collection of scientific material that should have the same relation to the new and developing science of anthropology ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... total number of airports. The runway(s) may be paved (concrete or asphalt surfaces) or unpaved (grass, dirt, sand, or gravel surfaces), but must be usable. Not all airports have facilities for refueling, maintenance, or air ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... be of brick, stone, concrete or iron. If necessarily of wood they shall be extra heavy, located in a dry place and open to ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... terrestrial ball one illimitable fry turned over and well done,—a fry ever doing and never done, which should simmer and fizzle on eternally down the ages. An abstract fry—let me here record it—suits me passing well; yet I like not the concrete and personal broil. I trip gayly to a feast, prepared to eat, but not, as in the supper of Polonius, to be eaten. I have very little of the martyr-stuff about me. It is well, it is glorious, to read of those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... It is to an extraordinary degree human, dealing all along with names as familiar to us as any in any history can be; with characters which are perfectly individual; with lives lived in the face of difficulty, danger, trial, sorrow, as concrete as possible; with deaths met and overcome under conditions of mystery, suspense, trial to courage and to trust, which for all time the heart of man can apprehend in their solemnity. Meanwhile, as a matter of diction and eloquence, the chapter carries in it ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... produce a plurality of number in their own essences, if we think of what we count instead of what we count with. For in the case of abstract number a repetition of single items does produce plurality; but in the case of concrete number the repetition and plural use of single items does not by any means produce numerical difference in the objects counted. There are as a fact two kinds of number. There is the number with which we count (abstract) and the number inherent in the things counted ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... of the Water-god or his enemy became assimilated with those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent, the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the life-destroying ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... tendency 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 ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... problems in economics, as a volume published a year earlier dealt with the broader economic principles of value and distribution. To the student beginning economics and to the general reader the study of principles is likely to appear more difficult than does that of concrete questions. In fact, the difficulty of the latter, tho less obvious, is equally great. The study of principles makes demands upon thought that are open and unmistakable; its conclusions, drawn in the cold light of reason, are uncolored by feeling, and are acceptable of all men ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... Grant heard her slippers shuffling over the concrete. She arrived in a brilliant blue nylon robe, with white fluffy slippers and traces of a lighter blue nightgown underneath. The hangar brightness brought a frown to her eyes, which she shielded with ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... took their cue from the mother's gaiety, and began talking and laughing, except the father, who sat looking on with a smile at their lively spirits and the jokes of which Dan became the victim. Each family has its own fantastic medium, in which it gets affairs to relieve them of their concrete seriousness, and the Maverings now did this with Dan's engagement, and played with it as an airy abstraction. They debated the character of the embassy which was to be sent down to Boston on their behalf, and it was decided that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in defining an accident in the abstract, we do not put the subject as though it were the first part of the definition, viz. the genus; but we give it the second place, which is that of the difference; thus we say that simitas is "a curvature of the nose." But if we take accidents in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates at the accident: for "a white thing" is "something that has whiteness." Accordingly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... that I want to see, and Lord Westerham was just as right about the pit as he was about the man who runs it. Now, I take it over from to-day. You will stop all mining work at once, close the entrances to the galleries and put down a bed of concrete ten feet thick, level. Then you will go by the drawings that I gave you ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact that a Londoner in the country, or a countryman in London, felt equally out of place in those days of difficult travel, would seem to hardly require stating, and to afford no opportunity of leaving a strong impression ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pressure is likely to be attended with an escape of ground air from the soil, and therefore to cause injury to health, especially among the occupants of basement rooms, unless the whole interior of the building be covered with concrete. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... purpose than a shell could be diverted in its flight. He had been set to reduce Maubeuge and he had done so with speed and with thoroughness. Maubeuge was not protected by open-air earthworks, but by a circle of armor-plate concrete forts. To the mighty siege guns handled by General von Zwehl, these were no trouble, for Von Zwehl had not only the heavy batteries attached to the Seventh Army Reserve, but he also had a number of Von Kluck's guns and the majority of General von Buelow's, neither of whom was expected to need siege ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... gentlemen, most of what we learned, we learned from putting negamatter atoms together. We annihilated a few of them—over there in that little concrete building, we have one of the most massive steel vaults in the world, where we do that—but we assembled millions of them for every one we annihilated, and that chunk of nega-iron inside the magnetic bottle kept growing. And when you have ...
— The Answer • Henry Beam Piper
... if I can make plain to you what a habit is. Have you ever seen men laying concrete sidewalks here in the city, and they put boards across to keep people from walking on the pavements before they were thoroughly dry? I am sure you have. These men keep people off the walk while it is soft because, if any one steps on ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... tints; his pen is dipped in no colours but light and darkness. For the eye of infinite wisdom there is no need of shading. All things, all thoughts, all emotions, all experiences, all doubts and hopes and fears, all intentions, all wishes seen down to the lower strata of their concrete and multitudinous elements, are ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... very concrete laurels, too, Miss Dane," he returned indifferently, though his face had lighted at her eager accent. "Some of the wreaths must have been four feet across, and I invariably tripped over the ribbons, when I carried them off the stage. I did wish they would furnish a dray; garlands are horribly in ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... 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; ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Accordingly, it was arranged that I should retire gracefully and recommend my official successor to my American friends in a short speech. This I did with perfect good-will. But the Foreign Office, though they did not reckon without their host, had reckoned without his guests. When the concrete proposal (well-meant, I am sure) was made in all its glorious navet in a little speech by the new host, it was received with something like annoyance—a fact which worried me not a little, for I had, rather unwisely perhaps, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... stated too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the concrete facts with which conduct has ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... of Mallarme, Pound's verse is always definite and concrete, because he has always a definite emotion ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... erect poise suggested a military training. His coat, thrown carelessly open to the cold night wind, displayed an expanse of white indicative of evening dress. As he walked his heels clicked sharply on the concrete with the forceful firm tread of the type which does things quickly and decisively. The intense stillness of the early morning hours carried the sound in little staccato beats that could be heard ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... village of Clayton is five miles inland from Clayton-on-Sea, that new and popular resort hardened with asphalt and concrete, to which city folk retire for a change in the summer. During the winter months many of the shops of the big town are closed till summer brings the holiday-makers again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fill with street litter, old paper, and straws. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... central path of four feet, and a bed of four feet on each side. An earth or tile floor and a slate or stone shelf will, with one four-inch flow and return pipe, complete the arrangements. The less wood and the less concrete the better; there is nothing like porous red tiles for the floor and stone for the shelves, with loose planks on edge to keep up the soil, a few uprights being sufficient to hold them ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... Campo: sullen, thievish, vindictive, and bloodthirsty, whatever great qualities their brothers of the plain might have had. But then there was that other sentimentalist, who attached a strangely idealistic meaning to concrete facts. This stream of silver must be kept flowing north to return in the form of financial backing from the great house of Holroyd. Up at the mountain in the strong room of the mine the silver bars were ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and that showed her with a distinctness that was fanciful and lurid the moving faces of hundreds of strangers, the dull roar of voices, and the heat that flowed from the human bodies, seemed to mingle, to become concrete, to lie upon her spirit like a weight. Artois stood by her, leaning on his stick and watching the crowd with his steady eyes. The Marchesino was looking up at Vere, standing in a position that seemed to indicate a longing that she should rest her ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... hold: they obscure its divine element, and thus seem to extinguish it. Even the life of Jesus was belittled and belied by personalities possessing these defacing de- formities. Only the devout Marys, and such as lived according to his precepts, understood the concrete char- [25] acter of him who taught—by the wayside, in humble homes, to itching ears and to dull disciples—the words ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... examined in this valley were of the same general character as these two, although we found no granaries in them. On this page is shown the ground plan of a cave on the east side of the river, and attention is drawn to the singular concrete seats or blocks against the wall in the house on the west side of the cave. A floor of concrete had been made in this cave extending ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... necessarily go before and along with it. True prophetism everywhere knows of salvation for a remnant only. On [Hebrew: pliTh], which does not mean "deliverance," so that the abstract would thus here stand for the concrete, but "that which has escaped," comp. remarks on Joel iii. 5, Vol. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... 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 black hair was brushed straight back ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... summer Sundays, when "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution: to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough for the boy to say he preferred business, and that he wanted uncle Silas ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... Reate. The fourth and last kind of fence is of built up masonry. There are usually four varieties: those of cut stone, as in the country around Tusculum; those of burned brick, as in Gaul; those of unburned brick as in the Sabine country; those of gravel concrete,[71] as ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... closed his eyes and shuddered. When he opened them again, the moon had emerged from behind a cloud, and he could see clearly the cruel trap into which he had accidentally stumbled. A pile of old boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete mixer—well, it added up. ...
— The Hoofer • Walter M. Miller
... not in the court of Augustus, that it was not dependent on the Roman armies or Greek learning, but that it was bound up in the career and teaching of a Baby that night born in a stable in an obscure village in Judea. As we imagine such a case we see in the concrete the meaning of the revolution set in motion by this single event; and we are led to adore the ways of God in that He has chosen for the final approach to man for the purpose of redemption, this way of simplicity and humbleness. Man would not have thought of this as the best path for God to ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... children ask are as the sands of the sea, yet sifted and analyzed, they reveal a fairly uniform structure on which one may build. It is a foursquare structure of pregnancy, birth, fertilization, and mating, in the order named. They start with a concrete situation—"Where did Mrs. Holmes get her baby?"—and the three others follow in logical sequence. Of course, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... different from what it means when put in any other way. Because it is perfect. You can jumble it all up, and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it was before. It was a marvellous mind that produced it. As a mental tour de force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete, and the occult.' ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... chewed every mouthful of food thirty times—coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)—a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... her participation in the apology; and, a few moments later, the apothecary and both ladies (the one as fond of the abstract as the other two were ignorant of the concrete) were engaged in an animated, running discussion on art, society, climate, education,—all those large, secondary desiderata which seem of first importance to young ambition and secluded beauty, flying to and fro among these subjects with ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... tender care. Waldstricker's child was to her, then, the most loathsome of breathing creatures. She might let the squatters kill her; she might even do it herself. But this was another thing! Face to face with the concrete case of pinching a baby's wrists, her instinct sent her fingers to the tight cords about the uplifted hands. Without conscious purpose, she, also, loosened the plump ankles. Elsie rolled in a whimpering, little heap on ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... another of these thoughts—on religion, on poetry, on politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated subjects, such as music, and special musical composers—he was meant, if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is itself ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of ...
— A Filbert Is a Nut • Rick Raphael
... with actions. His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the passion for the detailed and the concrete. In Transcendentalism he bids a younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob Boehme ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... heart jumped sideways and upwards with a wiggling movement, turning two somersaults, and stopped beating. The hideous truth, working its way slowly through the concrete, had at last penetrated to his brain. He was not only in somebody else's room, and a woman's at that. He was in the room belonging ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... question was from no desire to drive my host into a corner, but came from an innocent interest in him and a wish to get at something concrete. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... answer you," said Peter Morrison, "because my ideas on the subject are still slightly nebulous, but I am only too willing to see them become concrete." ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... 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 ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... liberty and pursuit of happiness by securing to them an equal right in the bounties of nature—and passing strange it certainly is that men who would not dream of denying this right in the abstract are ever ready to anathematize it in the concrete. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a moment's silence, a silence when Hayden's heart-beats sounded louder than the patter of their feet on the concrete pavement or the distant and mighty roar of the city—and then Marcia lifted ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... little impatiently. He had forgotten the concrete, for the moment, in the abstract, and was donning his armor for a battle with Kenny upon the "fundamentals." Hence he was not too well pleased with Yankee's interruption. But Donald Ross gladly welcomed the diversion. The subject was to him ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... upon a pile of bricks, and Norgate followed his example. There was a boarded space before them, with scaffolding poles all around, but no other signs of building, and the interior consisted merely of a perfectly smooth concrete floor. ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cap. In the young stage the volva forms a universal veil, that is, a layer of fungus tissue which entirely envelops the young plant. In the button stage, where this envelope runs over the cap, it is more or less free from it, that is, it is not "concrete" with the surface of the pileus. As the pileus expands and the stem elongates, the volva is ruptured in different ways according to the species. In some the volva splits at the apex and is left as a "cup" at the base of the stem. In others it splits circularly, that is, transversely ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson did not flinch, as did many of his associates, from giving that right a full and general application to blacks as well as whites. Nor was he a mere doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He described what he had seen. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,—the most unremitting despotism on ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... depend upon it that in truth she gives the lie to her conscience by maintaining such a transparent fallacy. Women's brains are not formed for assisting at any profound science: they lack the power to see things except in the concrete. She'll blab your most secret plans and theories to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... characteristics predominate: a great intensity of feeling, which sometimes sinks into sentimentality, and at others rises into lyric fervour; and a wonderful truth, not only to the general impressions of his experience, but to the actual concrete facts of it, even to such trifles as the names of persons and places. Thus The Forefathers, despite all its fantastic elements, reproduces many incidents in which the poet himself was concerned. Furthermore, in certain works, as in his early tale Grazyna, Mickiewicz had shown ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... character, and are participated in by both men and women. Examples will present themselves in abundance on reflection, but for the purpose of indicating the range of the propensities in question and of characterizing them, some of the more obvious concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the agitation for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison reform, for the spread of education, for the suppression of vice, and for the avoidance of war by arbitration, disarmament, or other means; such are, in some measure, university settlements, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... much harm in the estimation of thinking men—and curiously enough, since it was written, reptiles have been found in the old red sandstone, and insectivorous mammals in the Trias! Owen is an able man, but to my mind not so great as he thinks himself. He can only work in the concrete from bone to bone, in abstract reasoning he becomes lost—witness "Parthenogenesis" which he told me he considered one of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... its pedestal and fell with a crash across the roadway. At first he thought it an optical illusion and wiped his eyes again, but it was nothing of the kind. The monument, which had a moment before pointed to the zenith, now lay shattered in three pieces upon the softening concrete of the drive. The stranger arose and examined the fragments of the monolith, one of which lay squarely across the road, barring all passage. Round the pedestal were scattered small pieces of broken granite, and from these, after looking about cautiously, ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... discontinue pumping, I was obliged to abandon my work; and having little hope that I should ever be allowed to recommence it, I removed a portion of the lead, which proved to be a thickness of about 30lbs. to the foot, placed on a layer of brick concrete 2in. to 21/4in. thick, and this again on a layer of freestone 12in., or rather a Roman foot 11-5/8in. in thickness, which was again bedded on rough stonework, the depth of which I could not ascertain. Fortunately I did not again fill in the soil, but arched it in, building walls of masonry ...
— The Excavations of Roman Baths at Bath • Charles E. Davis
... loafing which invariably takes place upon the occasion of the relaying of the wooden pavement. I say wooden more particularly, inasmuch as new fangled varieties of pavement, such as Concrete, Nicholson, etc., although they have their day, cannot be said to compete for a moment in public regard with the good old fashioned kind ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... is very curious," said the psychologist. "We talk of generalizing, but is there any such thing? Aren't we always striving from one concrete to another, and isn't what we call generalizing merely a process of finding ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... from which a free 'bus runs to a station upon the line of an excellent railway. Maisonneuve fought his great fight upon a place from which a vicious mayor cut the trees which once sheltered the soldier, to make way for a fountain upon which would be raised "historical" figures in concrete stone. ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... for three months of Antonin-Carles, Paris. With this exception, Mme. Girardet writes: "I studied mostly alone, looking to nature as the best teacher, and with energetic perseverance trying to give out in a concrete form all that ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... passed another farm down in Iowa, whose owner had tried to make his place conspicuous by putting a concrete wall and gateway in front of his house, and making lavish use of white paint in decorating his buildings and grounds. He succeeded, but I cannot help thinking that if he had put the money that useless concrete work cost into shrubbery ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... had finished the daily tasks by means of which he earned a subsistence, or, more usually, as a member of a leisure class that was exempt from the necessity of labor, the man dominated by strong creative impulses sought to embody, in some concrete form, the desires which he felt springing up within him, and which could not be satisfied by physical activity. He turned, therefore, to drawing, to painting, to music, to ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... strictly ecclesiastical festival, the commemoration of the Nativity as the beginning of man's redemption. We have seen how in the carols, the cult of the presepio, and the religious drama, the Birth of the King of Glory in the stable at midwinter has presented itself in concrete form to the popular mind, calling up a host of human emotions, a crowd of quaint and beautiful fancies. Lastly we have noted the survival, in the most varied degrees of transformation, of things which are alien to Christianity and in some cases seem to go back to very primitive ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... built of a natural concrete called culeche. The external walls are rough, but are smoothly plastered within, showing the marks of human hands. Two pairs of small holes in the walls opposite others in the central room have ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Kekwick Ponds. Started again on a bearing of 345 degrees to some very distant hills, to see if I can get into the face of the country to the Gulf of Carpentaria. At two miles crossed a large gum creek (with long beds of concrete ironstone), which I have named Hayward Creek, after Frederick Hayward, Esquire. The banks are beautifully grassed, and extend for four miles on the north side. At fourteen miles struck a gum creek with large sheets of water in which were plenty of ducks, native companions, black shags, cranes, ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... Missouri is more than a sentiment—even more than an epic. It is the symbol of my own soul, which is, I surmise, not unlike other souls. In it I see flung before me all the stern world-old struggle become materialized. Here is the concrete representation of the earnest desire, the momentarily frustrate purpose, the beating at the bars, the breathless fighting of the half-whipped but never-to-be-conquered spirit, the sobbing of the wind-broken runner, the anger, the madness, the laughter. And in it all the unwearying ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... hundred pamphlets and books of that description. But from its very nature, and I am writing with the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... to him, and understand him and his crisis; but, all the time he hoped, he was conscious of a sneaking fear lest she would not. Scott loved to talk things out, and Catie, when she was not too busy otherwise, was a good listener. Nevertheless, her comprehensions were concrete and very, very finite. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... necessary, as the heat developed by the chemical action between the phosphate and the acid is sufficiently great. The phosphate, after being thoroughly mixed with the acid, is discharged into what is technically known as the pit, a chamber built of brick or concrete. The mixture, which is in a fluid state when it enters the pit, very soon hardens, and is dug out in a day or two. It is next reduced to powder in a disintegrator, and is then ready for use ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... is no definite cause for it—mind, I say that—I may do something to relieve your distress. When people have no pleasure in living, and there is no concrete reason for it, they are out of health, and argument is of no avail. If a man does not find that food and light and the air are pleasant, it is of no use to debate with himself. Have you ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... it has seemed well to divide the following list into two parts—the first devoted to the discussion of theory, the other offering concrete suggestions. ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... an abstract, speculative phase of the Monroe Doctrine, took on the concrete and somewhat urgent form of security for our trans-Isthmian routes against foreign interference towards the middle of this century, when the attempt to settle it was made by the oft-mentioned Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, signed April 19, 1850. Great Britain ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... The biologic tree has grown and developed as the geologic soil in which it is rooted has deepened and ripened. I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... and it was at present fully occupied and rather more by a camp cook and his 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 as a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to me, which I have just been reading once ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... present revision, the salient features of the original edition have been kept. The truths presented are the most fundamental and important in the field of psychology. Disputed theories and unsettled opinions are excluded. The subject matter is made concrete and practical by the use of many illustrations and through application to real problems. The style has been kept easy and familiar to facilitate the reading. In short, there has been, while seeking to improve the volume, a conscious purpose to omit none of the characteristics ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... be concrete they will make their creeds amusingly simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls on Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first pair? The Tree of Knowledge, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... intellectual men, who formed the most powerful nucleus of the Church after the fourth century, took up again the Roman idea of unity and of empire; but they transferred it from matter to mind, from the concrete world of economic and political interests, to the world of ideas and beliefs. They tried to re-do, by pen and word, the work of the Scipios, of Lucullus, and of Caesar, to conquer the world, not indeed ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be seen in it anything that tends towards the lowering of common standards? any misuse of things sacred or holy? any foolish or vulgar estimate of the higher things of life?" And if we are in any doubt how to put these questions in a concrete and practical shape, we have only to remember how any one who helps to lower any standard of taste or conduct is debasing the moral currency of life; how, for instance, all those are debasing it who substitute any wrong notion of honour ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... value as applied to more recent times, even at the risk of being tedious, I will give some examples from my own professional experience. I do this because nothing adds more to the efficacy of truth than the translation of the abstract into the concrete. Withholding names, I will state the facts with ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... and his aloneness. As the fox returns to peer stealthily upon the deadfall that has almost caught him, so the trapline was possessed now of a new thrill for Miki. Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger. And he welcomed it. His wits were sharpened. The fascination of the trapline ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... What can be said in a concrete way in regard to the practical application of these truths, so that one can hold himself in the enjoyment of perfect bodily health; and more, that one may heal himself of any existing disease? In reply, let it be said that the chief thing that can be done is to point out the great underlying principle, ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... anarchist at all. The complexion of that case had somehow forced upon him the general idea of the absurdity of things human, which in the abstract is sufficiently annoying to an unphilosophical temperament, and in concrete instances becomes exasperating beyond endurance. At the beginning of his career Chief Inspector Heat had been concerned with the more energetic forms of thieving. He had gained his spurs in that sphere, and naturally enough ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... again reset, has another added chapter. J. B. Cranfill was a trail driver from a rough range before he became a Baptist preacher and publisher. His bulky Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas, 1916, is downright and concrete. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... a man may be, from the point of view of imperfect human knowledge, in the admittance of humanly proved fact, there is no reason why, from the emotional and imaginative side of his existence, he should not rigidly subscribe to dogma or personal conviction, whether the abstract idea of virtue, the concrete idea of love for some cherished human being, or the yearning for some supernatural state of sinlessness be concerned. A distinguished financier, for instance, may regale his imagination with socialistic dreams of a perfect Utopia; but, when ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... electricity all right; but you see he's not progressive—he has no 'git up and git,' as they say around here. Of course, he expects to find electric lights and concrete sidewalks in town, but electric lights on his farm and good roads from here to town would never enter his head," was ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused, seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the cockney school ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... this paper to show that reinforced concrete engineers have certain rules and practices which are no more logical than those governing the blood-letting of former days. If the writer fails in this, by reason of the more weighty arguments on the other side of the questions ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... and excited as the villages passed by, and presently the trim concrete structure lettered in gold and black as San Friole came into sight ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis), reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... when he reached the corner of Pancha's street, the first gleam of the coming day. Like one who sees temptation placed before him in living form and hesitates, reluctant yet impelled, he stood and gazed at the front of the Vallejo Hotel. The lamps showed up a pinkish orange, two spheres, concrete and solid, in a swimming, silvery unreality. Beyond the steps a man's figure moved, walking up the street, his back to Mayer. It was very quiet; the hush before the city, turning in its sleep, stretched, breathed ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... right, as one approaches the city, is Cavite, which Dewey took on that historic May day in 1898. The spires of many churches are the most conspicuous landmarks in Manila, but as the distance lessens a huge mass of concrete, the new Manila hotel, looms up near the docks. The bay is full of ships and alongside the docks are a number ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... at marriage. Alexina put it into concrete words. Subconsciously she had always known it. She had had no cares, no responsibilities. She had merely continued to play, to keep her imagination on that plane ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... and old friends had made itself tangible; and heard the kindly words of the elder Mr. Rushleigh to Kate Livingston, who stood with his son Philip, and whose bridal, it was well known, was to come next? Jewels, and silver, and gold, are such flashing, concrete evidences of love! And the courtly condescension of an old and world-honored man to the young girl whom his son has chosen, is such a winning and ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... national, and in the upper the federal principle should have full recognition. This was a departure from the Virginia plan to the extent that it in effect proposed the establishment of a federal republic,—in the concrete, that the House should be composed of representatives chosen directly by the people from districts of equal population; while representation in the Senate should be that of the States, each, regardless of population, to have two members, to be chosen ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... as to the early date of composition, Luis de Leon gives no precise information as to when individual poems were written. The assertion that the poems date back almost to the author's childhood is contradicted by concrete facts. Take, for instance, the celebrated Noche serena dedicated to Oloarte. If, as I conjecture, the dedicatee of the Noche serena is identical with the Diego de Loarte, archdeacon of Ledesma, who gave evidence at Salamanca ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... one of these letters from America, in fact, which put the notion of emigrating to the New World definitely in my mind. An illiterate woman brought it to the synagogue to have it read to her, and I happened to be the one to whom she addressed her request. The concrete details of that letter gave New York tangible form in my imagination. It haunted me ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... perhaps apply to his treatment of the "affair of 1875," which largely determined the future groupings of the Powers. At that time the recovery of France from the wounds of 1870 was well nigh complete; her military and constitutional systems were taking concrete form; and in the early part of the year 1875 the Chambers decreed a large increase to the armed forces in the form of "the fourth battalions." At once the military party at Berlin took alarm, and through their chief, Moltke, pressed on the Emperor William the need ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... governments, is the good of mankind; and the possession of as much freedom by each State, as is consistent with the attainment of that end. But there is this difference: that the government thus set up over nations is ideal, and has no concrete representative of the sovereign power; whence the only way of settling any dispute finally is to fight it out. Thus the supra-national society is continually in danger of returning to the state of nature, in which contracts are void; and the possibility of this contingency ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... we received concrete proof of how desperate was the situation. To the right of us we heard cries and rifle-shots. Bullets whistled dangerously near. There was a crashing in the underbrush; then a magnificent black truck-horse broke across ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... who fought as fiercely about names as nations about territories, divided men into the sanguine, the bilious, the lymphatic and the nervous. It was a pretty crude classification of different constitutions. The endocrine criteria, more exact and concrete, divide them into the adrenal centered, the thyroid centered, the thymus centered, the pituitary centered, the gonad centered, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Manasaputra descended to endow with mind the bulk of Humanity who were still without the spark, yet so feebly burned the light all through the Atlantean days that few could be said to have attained to the powers of abstract thought. On the other hand the functioning of the mind on concrete things came well within their grasp, and as we have seen it was in the practical concerns of their every-day life, especially when their psychic faculties were directed towards the same objects, that they achieved such remarkable and ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot |
