"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... capital; but it was not conscious itself toward what end it was straining; it did not know that the true objective of its effort was the common ownership of property. And, on the other hand, socialism did not know that the labor movement was the living form in which its spirit was embodied, the concrete practical force of which it stood in need. Marx was the most clearly convinced and the most powerful among those who put an end to the empiricism of the labor movement and the utopianism of the socialist thought, and this should always be remembered ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... suggest it; there is plenty of philosophy to be drawn from a daisy, but we do not therefore call a daisy a philosophic flower. So, too, we may philosophize about Wagner's Tristan, but the philosophy is our own; it is not in the work. What is meant no doubt is that the work itself is not a concrete reality, but an exposition of an abstract conception. Philosophy has only herself to blame if abstractions are in the naif, ordinary mind opposed to realities, for it is unhappily true that nearly the whole of our current ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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
... required—viz. smoothness, durability, and quiet. The blocks, which are shaped at such an angle that they give the most perfect mutual support, are joined to each other by oaken dowels, and laid on a hard concrete foundation, presenting a level surface, over which the impact is so equally divided, that the whole mass resists the pressure on each particular block; and yet, from being formed in panels of about a yard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... notes and a correspondence full of madrigals and sparkling wit was declared to be the last phase of the tender passion; love had reached the Doctrinaire stage; or had passed, in other words, from the concrete to the abstract. The illustrious lady, so cruelly ridiculed under the name of Octavie by Beranger, had conceived (so it was said) the gravest fears. The correspondence was languishing. The more Octavie displayed her wit, the cooler grew the royal lover. At last Octavie discovered ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that a State is good not when it conforms to some abstract eternal ideal of what a State ought to be, as the Greeks thought, but when it conforms to the interests of particular concrete individuals, namely, its citizens, all of them that are in mental and moral health; and that the way to find out their interests is not to sit on a throne or a bench and think about it but to go and ask them.... Barring this question of democracy, I think ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... contemporary rationalism. The metaphysician of the time identifies emotions and passions with intellectual affirmations, and all action is a product of logic. In any case we have to do with a period in which the old concrete imagery has lost its hold upon the more intelligent classes, and instead of an imaginative symbolism we have a system of abstract reasoning. Diagrams take the place of concrete pictures: and instead of a Milton justifying the ways of Providence by the revealed history, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only "look and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... The huge concrete piers which they had noticed were not piers at all, but the ruined foundations of buildings. They had been baked by the searing heat, baked and charred almost to the ground. Nothing else remained, only this ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick
... to the town as a free gift, by the Right Honble. gentleman, as Lord of the Manor. The following is the official description of the monument, as published at the time of its erection. The structure is 31-ft. 6-in. in height. It stands on a massive foundation of concrete; with three tiers of Yorkshire stone steps, each 15-in. wide, running round the base leading up to the monument proper, their shape being octagonal. With the exception of two strings of Dumfries' red stone, the lower part is of Monk's Park stone. Above this is a moulded string course, and on each ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... "thought is a wonderful quality of the mind—transports us in a moment from the Indies to the poles; fastens with equal facility on the substantial and the impalpable; gropes among the vague generalities of the abstract, and wriggles with ease through the thick obscurities of the concrete—eh, Queeker? Come, give us a song, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... bead-decked shirts and fringed leggings, their supple feet clad in embroidered moccasins, outshone even the most magnificent of "Wild West" shows; and without a spoken word each understood the desire of their Chief. They rode to the semi-circle of concrete before the main entrance to the great house and ranged themselves around it, the Chief in front, alone, and as the last hoof fell into position where the rider wished, they became as rigid as a company of warriors ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... 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
... 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 had kept for it, after his promotion to another department, a feeling not ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... clearly now that murder had been in his heart. She was not appalled nor desolated. She thought: 'So that is murder, that little thing, that thing over in a minute!' It appeared to her that murder in the concrete was less dreadful than murder in the abstract, far less horrible than the strident sound of the word on the lips of a newsboy, or the look of it in the 'Signal.' She felt dimly that she ought to be shocked, unnerved, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... of all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them; and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of Essen knew about the new mortar which the firm of Friedrich Krupp manufactured at its own expense and which later, because its shell rapidly smashed the strongest fortifications of reinforced concrete, our military authorities promptly acquired. Must we be ashamed of this instrument of destruction and take from the lips of the "cultured world" the wry reproach that from "Faust" and the Ninth Symphony we have sunk our national ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... He was not quite sure what an island might be like in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... However commercialised Paris might become, you could not cheapen the environs of Notre Dame! Whatever happens to us, let us hope that we will always keep Washington Square as it is today,—our little and dear bit of fine, concrete history, the one perfect page of ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... that we have a new generation of young people since the war; a generation which thinks for itself, and has its own way. I was an advocate of this idea in the abstract, but I must admit that I was startled by the concrete case which I now encountered. Bertie suddenly looked round from his place in the driver's seat. "Say," he demanded, in a grating voice, "where was that ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... They were still discussing when, an hour later, they, too, disappeared into the darkness that swallowed up the trail to Ashley Ranch. That was the first of many such services. The preaching was always of the simplest kind, abstract questions being avoided and the concrete in those wonderful Bible tales, dressed in modern and in western garb, set forth. Bill and Hi were more than ever his friends and champions, and the latter was heard exultantly ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... of the most important in the whole war. High Wood out there commands a view of the whole of this part of the Somme and is most valuable. There are estimated to be about ten thousand Germans in that wood and in the surrounding supports. The positions are mostly of concrete with hundreds of machine guns and field artillery. Our heavies have for some reason made no impression on them, and regiment after regiment has attempted to take the woods and failed with heavy losses. Now it is up to the 47th Division to do the seemingly impossible. Zero is ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... undefined. That the maximum of physical beauty does not constitute the maximum of Fine Art, is apparent from the facts of the physical beauty of Early Christian Art being inferior to that of Grecian art; whilst, in the concrete, Early Christian Art is superior to Grecian. Indeed some specimens of Early Christian Art are repulsive rather than beautiful, yet these are in many cases ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... she was more than these. The 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... takes a singular satisfaction in gazing at mummies preserved in human semblance in the unearthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once massive boulder—now carefully mended—was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, and over it was reared, from the designs of Hammatt Billings, the ugliest granite canopy imaginable—in which canopy, to complete the grisly atmosphere of the catacombs, were placed certain human bones found in an exploration of Cole's Hill. Bleak ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... to have a moral motive. The stories are short and naturally slight; some, indeed, incline rather to the essay than to the story, but each has that enthralling interest which justifies its existence. Coppee possesses preeminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction. A sketch, for instance, is the first tale written by him, 'Une Idylle pendant le Seige' (1875). In a novel we require strong characterization, great grasp of character, and the novelist should show us the human heart and intellect ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which the architect has decorated most tastefully. Everything at the chalet is charmingly simple, with the simplicity which can't be got under a hundred thousand francs. Our ground-floor rests on cellars, which are built of millstone and embedded in concrete; it is almost completely buried in flowers and shrubs, and is deliciously cool without a vestige of damp. To complete the picture, a fleet of white ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... 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 Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... of life about the place. The shades were drawn; it bore a look of desertion. Only pausing for a moment, as even a book-agent might, after many repeated rebuffs, Garrison wended his way across the street, proceeded slowly up the concrete walk, ascended the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... them spools are, too; about six feet high, three wide, and weighin' a ton or so each, I should judge. And to make the job of movin' 'em all the merrier an old cement mixer has been at work right next to 'em and the surplus concrete has been thrown out until they've been bedded in as solid as so many bridge piers. I climbs ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... Well, we must put aside abstractions and get to the concrete. What's this, citizen? (showing ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... is so much more entertaining than the concrete. It affords opportunities for generalisation, which is ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... seized upon him in Sunset, it had been an abstract rebellion against the futility of life as he was living it. This was different: This was a definite, concrete sense of failure to keep faith with himself and with Mason; the sickening consciousness of a swinish return to the wallow; a distrust of himself that was beyond any emotion he had ever felt ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... it must be an armour-clad rooster of this species that, crossed with a Plymouth Rock, was responsible for the reinforced-concrete chicken that we met at dinner the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... You didn't answer my question, Soligen. Why stick your neck out? Most of you Telly reporters, stick it out in some concrete pillbox with lots of telescopic equipment." He added bitterly, "And usually away from what's really ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... national and Roman. Ideas had been borrowed, and these ideas certainly resulted in increased efficiency and therefore in increased wealth. But the gross material of Hellenism, whether as realised in intellectual ideas or (the prize that appealed more immediately to the practical Roman with his concrete mind) in tangible things, had not been seized as a whole as the reward of victory: and no great attempt had been made in former ages to assimilate the one or to enjoy the other. The nature of the material rewards which had been secured ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... it is, there is not in it any real trace of the abstract conception of social history. Polybius recognises the unity of history, so far as that could be understood in the second century before Christ, but he treats his subject in the concrete, describing the chain of events, but not attempting to seek their law. It was Montesquieu who first applied the comparative method to social institutions; who first considered physical conditions in connection with the laws of a country; who first perceived and illustrated how that natural ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... keen insight into abstract truth; but he was an Englishman to the backbone in his severe adherence to the real and the concrete. He had a most classical taste, and a genius for philosophy and art; and he was fond of historical inquiry, and the politics of religion. He had no turn for theology as such. He had no appreciation of the writings of the Fathers, of the detail or development of doctrine, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... principal street was well-nigh deserted in the lethargy of the noon-day siesta, but the flower-market was a riotous blaze of color in the glistening white plaza, from which radiated broad vistas of fantastically painted adobe and soberer concrete, ending in ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... comment was no idle one. Not only had the year been a red-letter one but it was destined to prove even more conspicuously memorable. With the spring the plans for the new village went rapidly forward and soon pretty little concrete houses with roofs of scarlet and trimmings of green dotted the slopes on the opposite side of the river. The laying out and building of this community became Grandfather Fernald's recreation and delight. Morning, noon, and evening he could be seen either perusing curling sheets ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... 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
... unusual, but by no means unique. And this is the very core of the matter. It is because I understand my history, in its larger outlines, to be typical of many, that I consider it worth recording. My life is a concrete illustration of a multitude of statistical facts. Although I have written a genuine personal memoir, I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact that it is illustrative of scores of unwritten lives. I am only one of many whose fate it has been to live a page of modern history. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... very little people the most important part was the high front against which they were accustomed to stand, not the flat top which they seldom saw. Another set of children made a cart on which the farmer was to carry his corn, and exemplified Dewey's "concrete logic of action." At first they only wanted a board on wheels, but the corn fell off, so they nailed on sides, but the cart never had either back or front and resembled some seen in ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... of this paper may be explained by a concrete example. When a barefoot boy steps on a sharp stone there is an immediate discharge of nervous energy in his effort to escape from the wounding stone. This is not a voluntary act. It is not due to his own personal experience— his ontogeny—but ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... well-known words which have no chance of being misunderstood in the way in which they have been misunderstood by both the vernacular translators. Indeed, K.P. Singha blunders ridiculously, while the Burdwan translator limits them to only the use of food, supposing the commentator's concrete examples exhaust the meaning. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... have said, Brooklyn is rather a condition than a concrete fact. I believe every great Babylon has its neighbouring Brooklyn. London has it; Boston has it; Paris has it; even Chicago has it. And the line of demarcation between what is Brooklyn and what is not Brooklyn is not always a sharp one. There are many people in Manhattan who at ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... deposited his tray of images on the steps, holding up a long string of birds'-eggs blown, tiny varicolored globes plundered from the thrushes, bobolinks, blue-jays, and cedar-birds, and trembling upon the thread as if their concrete melody ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... interest from speculation about the universe, life, and mankind, to the material interests of their new country. Germany became the preoccupation of all Germans. From abstractions they turned with a new intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete. Entering thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... practically worn-out, and of very little value. These ships, like those used in the first attempt, were loaded with stones and scrap iron consolidated into a mass by pouring liquid cement over it, thus converting it into a sort of reinforced concrete, underneath which was buried the explosion charges destined to blow out the bottoms of the ships and sink them upon their arrival at their ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... water. There will be room for a 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 ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... on man left behind him concrete evidence of his existence in the form of tools and arms and pictures and in a general way we can say that history begins when the last cold period had become ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... everlasting light," is the promise made to Zion. St. John expressly uses the term of the Son of God, our Lord: "That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Whilst the more concrete emblem is used as often. In the eighty-fourth psalm, the psalm of pilgrimage, we read, "The Lord God is a sun and shield;" Malachi predicts that "the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings," and St James, with ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... frame of mind, and walked from room to room praising the excellence of everything, including a little gingerbread mantel in the dining-room, in which the fireplace had been set crooked,—from being done in the dark, perhaps,—the concrete backyard, with its clothesline pole, the decorated ceilings, the precipitous park opposite that was presently to shut off each day at two P.M. our western, and only, sunlight; even the air-shaft that came down to us like a well from ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... girls you ever saw!" exclaimed Bea as the two freshmen turned from the curving concrete walk into the road that led ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... granite, and a terrace 673 feet long next the river, and 35 feet wide, in front of the new Houses, with an esplanade at each end 100 feet square, with landing stairs from the river 12 feet wide. The whole surface of the front building was to be excavated, and filled in with concrete 12 feet thick, thus forming a permanent and solid foundation for the superstructure. Towards the end of this year, the Queen was somewhat pestered with lunatics. On Nov. 4, as she was going through Birdcage Walk on her return from Brighton, a man of respectable appearance went near the ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... concrete," says The National News, "are now quite common in America." The only complaint, it appears, is that some of them are just a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... steep and 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 strata; but what this ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... accomplished traders and most skillful artisans." Here was the promised land for Europeans, wretchedly poor, but good soldiers enough. Here was Eldorado, symbol of all external and objective values which so fired the imagination in that age of discovery; presenting a concrete and visualized goal, a summum bonum, attainable, not by contemplation, but by active endeavor; fascinating alike to the merchant dreaming of profits, to the statesman intent on conquest, to the priest in search of martyrdom, to the adventurer in, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... following the fourth chapter Lamarck states that, allowing for the variations in the intensity of the cause of elevation of the land as the result of the accumulations of organic matter, he thinks he can, without great error, consider the mean rate as 324 mm. (1 foot) a century. As a concrete example it has been observed, he says, that one river valley has risen a foot higher in the space of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the gangway which led away from the bottom of the stairs, the capitalist crept on through the darkness until he reached the base of a big concrete storage-vat. Groping for the lock which secured the outlet-cleaning-door of the big tank, he unlocked it and ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... superintendent how she should proceed in order to inculcate in her pupils a sense of responsibility. We should be acutely alert to catch every word of the superintendent's reply. If he were dealing with such a concrete problem as Milo and the calf, his response would probably be satisfactory; but when such an abstract quality as responsibility is presented to him his reply might be vague and unsatisfactory. His thinking may have had to do ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... quite a different part of the house. When I closely questioned her she located the queer noises precisely in the two rooms I had successively occupied. She did not learn from me that I had ever been there. Pressed for a concrete case of fright and abrupt leavetaking (I think), she told me two military officers had 'left ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... attained a certain state of consciousness, saw sickness, evil, and death around him, and as it was usual to assign to every effect some tangible cause, man developed the abstract notion of evil into a concrete form, which changed with the varying impressions of climate, food, and the state of intellectual progress. To the white man the Devil was black, and to the black man white. Originally, then, the Devil was merely a personification of the apparently ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... basements are now made with concrete floors. The ideal floor for storage purposes is an earth floor. However, we can put two or three inches of sand on our concrete floors and get good results. Sprinkle the sand with water from ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... allowances for the very rapid rotting action of the Ogowe water, so her hull rusted through before her engines were a quarter worn out; and there was nothing to be done with her then, but put a lot of concrete in, and make her a depot, in which state of life she is very useful, for during the height of the dry season, the Move cannot get through the creek to supply the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... excavation ran steel tracks, upon which were mounted the movable towers he had seen from a distance. These tapering structures bore aloft long, tautly drawn wire cables, spanning the gorge and supporting great buckets which soared at regular intervals back and forth, bearing concrete for the work below. Up and out of the depths tremendous walls were growing like the massive ramparts of a mediaeval city; tremendous steel forms, braced and trussed and reinforced to withstand the weight of the countless tons, stood in regular patterns. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are either decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your vague and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the concrete point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign Power, German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here in conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of mastery over us, ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... mother a Miss Rogers of Boston. She was a pupil 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 filled ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... well enough in their place, but to start with such things—as the French philosophers of the eighteenth century were fond of doing—is to get the cart before the horse. It is better to have our story first, and thus find out what government in its concrete reality has been, and is. Then we may finish up with the metaphysics, or do as I have done—leave it ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... they appear almost to meet in one, or to be two aspects of the same. Hence, without any reconciliation or even remark, in the Republic he speaks at one time of God or Gods, and at another time of the Good. So in the Phaedrus he seems to pass unconsciously from the concrete to the abstract conception of the Ideas in the same dialogue. Nor in the Philebus is he careful to show in what relation the idea of the divine mind stands to the supreme principle ...
— Philebus • Plato
... particles be small the steam generated beneath and around them will balloon them to the surface of the water, where the steam will be liberated and the particles will descend; and the impalpable particles in a marine boiler, which by their subsidence upon the flues concrete into scale, are carried in the first instance to the surface of the water, so that if they be caught there and ejected from the boiler, the formation of scale will ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... fully up-to-date, including such recent events as the British Parliament Act of 1911, the Italian-Turkish War, and the Balkan War, 1912-1913. Each topic is made definite and concrete, and such important subjects as the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany are ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... never learn whence the precious stones called Balassi are procured. Pearls are fished for in different places, as has been already mentioned. The substance called Spodium, which is found concreted in certain canes, is procured in Cambaza, Cambaya? Of this concrete I found many pieces in Pegu, when building myself a house there, as in that country they construct their houses of canes woven together like mats ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... warriors ate, the women's large room where they worked, two houses of many bedrooms, treasure vaults, a bath, storehouses. Narrow passages led from room to room. Flat roofs of thatch and clay covered all. And there were open courts with porches about the sides. The floors of the court were of tinted concrete. Sometimes they were inlaid with colored stones. The walls of the great hall had a painted frieze running about them. And around the whole palace went a ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... student who can concentrate his attention can learn quickly, George Marston has a notable power of concentration, Therefore George Marston can learn quickly, I again break up the abstraction student, and the concrete fact George Marston, and pay attention in each to the single characteristic, concentration of attention. Thus by means of these similar parts of different wholes I pass from the assertion concerning the class as a whole to the assertion concerning the concrete case. This process first of ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... regard as a crime against nature. This may be singular, for there are many inverted persons who have found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those described in Leaves of Grass, but Whitman was a man of concrete, emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive to all influences, and careless of harmonizing them. He would most certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love" occupies in his work a predominance ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... conduct his own rehearsals, similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer is a different fellow from the author as author. The producer is up against realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He suggests the casting. "What do you think of X. for the old man?" asks the producer. The author is staggered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so misread and misunderstood ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... to affect me. She was quite unable to tell me what she had seen, but her whole manner expressed a dazed horror, not so much of some concrete fear as of the ghastly position in which she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... its historic past, a mean, squalid, decaying little place. Being built almost entirely of wood, the town had sustained but little injury, but the massive concrete fort at the end of the peninsula had slid bodily into the sea, six-inch guns and all. Some twenty cocoa-nut palms it had taken with it were standing in the water, their brown withered tops just peering above the surface, giving a curious ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... solution was now in sight. Woodcutters had 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 ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... out of any of 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. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... with many more abstractions of a higher sort, and where the vocabulary is small the power of abstraction is wont to be as weak in adults as in children. The latter, to be sure, acquire the words for the abstract with more difficulty and later than those for the concrete, but have them stamped more firmly on the mind (for, when the word-memory fails, proper names and nouns denoting concrete objects are, as a rule, first forgotten). But it would not be admissible, as I showed above, to ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... descend from these heights (such as they are) of philosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false "idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examples occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's Duchess of Malfy and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Each of these plays excites horror and is calculated to excite horror; both ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ride we received concrete proof of how desperate was the situation. To the right of us we heard cries and rifle-shots. Bullets whistled dangerously near. There was a crashing in the underbrush; then a magnificent black truck-horse broke ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... for it's very dark in there," and he peered into the passage in front of which they all stood now. It seemed to have been tunneled through the earth, the sides being lined by either slabs of stone, or walls made by a sort of concrete. ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... could destroy her—and nothing but his own destruction could keep her away. She was the incarnation of all the short moments which every man spares out of his life for dreams, for precious dreams that concrete the most cherished, the most profitable of his illusions. He peered at her with inward trepidation. She was mysterious, significant, full of obscure meaning —like a symbol. He peered, bending forward, as though he had been discovering about her things he ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... sorts of buildings and ruins. One of the old barracks, three hundred feet long, was in good preservation in 1906, being utilized by the owner, Joseph Wilde, for a store, post office, hotel, and residence. The guard house with its grim iron door and twenty-inch concrete walls is also fairly well preserved. One frame building of two stories, we were told, was transported by ox team from Kansas City at a cost of one hundred dollars a ton. The old place is crumbling away, slowly disappearing with the memories of ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... importance. At El Tovar the matter was given more than usual care and foresight. An antiseptic system was installed, at a cost of over twenty thousand dollars. The sewage is conveyed by underground pipes a long distance to solid concrete tanks, where the solids are disposed of by natural processes. The liquids pass through eight filter beds, and then enter the ditch colorless ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... one phase of jurisprudence for only a moment, young man, just to see what a world of thought it opens to the mind. Institutional law is older, deeper, and even more vital than constitutional law. Our Constitution is one of the concrete manifestations of our institutions; our statutes are another; the decisions of our courts are another; our habits, methods, and customs as a people and a race are ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... changes in our social and industrial life which have attended this rapid growth have made it necessary that, in applying to concrete cases the great rule of right laid down in our Constitution, there should be a full understanding and appreciation of the new conditions to which the rules are to be applied. What would have been an infringement upon liberty half a century ago may be the necessary safeguard of liberty to-day. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... pictures, and all the evidences of a cultivated and elegant wickedness; he touched a stud and the sad pipings of Tristan's shepherd filled the air. His eye wandered from one object to another. They were costly and gross and florid—but they were his. They presented in concrete form his ideals, his conceptions of beauty and desire, his idea of all that is precious in life. And now—he must leave it all like a common man. He was, he felt, a slender and delicate flame, burning out. So must all life flame up ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... nature of the event. He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the concrete fact. To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which was kept alive by an artifice ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... triumphantly at Corliss. "Come, acknowledge your defeat, so that we may go in to dinner. Defeat for the time being, at least. The concrete facts of paddles and pack-straps quite overcome your dogmatics. Ah, I thought so. More time? All the time in the world. But let us go in. We'll see what my father thinks of it,—and Mr. Kellar. A symposium ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... relationships. But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty, will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the world, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... perhaps—though inconvenient, would not have weighed appreciably in the scale were he the only one affected. But though he was pursuing his course along the path of investigation eagerly and doing good work without a shadow of disappointment, he was aware not merely that he had not as yet made a concrete valuable discovery, but might never do so. This possibility did not appall him, but he recognized that it was a part of the circumstances of his particular case viewed from the standpoint of a contemplative judgment on his behavior. He was succeeding, but ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... understand his characters, we may not be informed whence they came or whither they move; there is nothing concrete or circumstantial about them; their life is intense and consistent, but it is wholly in a spiritual character. They are mysterious with the mystery of the ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... repeatedly placed the two in opposition; and even here I doubt whether he has done otherwise. I rather think he meant by the word 'idea' a notion under an indefinite and confused form, such as Kant calls a 'schema'or vague outline, an imperfect embryo of a concrete, to the individuation of which the mind gives no conscious attention; just as when I say—"any thing," I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... this reason that I have put them down here as a concrete instance of where and how America fell short in my own Americanization, and, what is far more serious to me, where she is falling short in her Americanization of thousands ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... the old well, and to the same depth. Water and mud were forced down the relief well under heavy-air pressure until the gas stratum was choked and the flow of gas shut off. The old well, which had made a crater 225 feet in diameter and 50 feet deep, was then permanently closed with concrete. ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... another purpose in view in preparing this book: He wishes to inspire others, especially the young, to use their eyes and ears in the study of the enchanting volume of Nature. This object, he believes, will be best accomplished by furnishing concrete examples of what may be achieved by earnest research. For purposes of stimulus an ounce of example is worth a pound of precept. If another sees you and me doing a thing joyfully, earnestly, we need scarcely say to him, "Go ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... that have been made by the introduction of the rubber-cored ball. We don't want to plagiarize, although a rubber-cored cricket ball is a nice idea. Why not aim at the opposite extreme and try a ball "reinforced" with concrete? The tingling of the batsman's fingers which might result could be neutralised by the use of a rubber-faced bat. This reform would, we believe, have one happy consequence. People wouldn't be so keen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... from age to age. 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 ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... conception of the supernatural world equally definite and authoritative, which dominated the intellects and imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The visible church and the invisible world of which the church held the interpretation and the key,—this concrete fact, and this faith the counterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... us be more concrete. Lay before the lady a complete case: describe your man, then I'll describe MINE, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... although it is a fact that had she been Medusa a singularly life-like replica of Dan Pennycook in concrete might have been produced, upon which the posterity of San Pasqual might gaze and be warned of the dangers attendant upon mating with the Mrs. Pennycooks ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... Wiggins,—"he is not impervious to appeal for sympathy from without. I trust I have defined a man of feeling, gentlemen, a man of heart, as regards the world in general. And now, to make an abrupt descent from the abstract to the concrete, from the general to the particular, I will permit myself to say that those aspersions cast upon me fourteen years ago as a mere promoter, irrespective of my manhood, hurt me as a man of feeling—a ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... in this part of his doctrine—and it is an important part—the brilliant French writer, in his endeavours to make philosophizing more concrete and practical, makes it too abstract. Intuition is not a process over against and quite distinct from conceptual thought. Both are moments in the total process of man's attempt to come to terms with the universe, and too great emphasis on either distorts ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... blame for exhibiting a certain degree of ferocity. The canine mind is wholly lacking in the power of deduction, its intelligence consisting rather of a highly developed instinctive faculty for retaining impressions which invariably express themselves in some concrete form such as hate, fear, joy, affection and like primitive emotions. Pat, for instance, has been taught to regard strangers as interlopers. He therefore resents the presence of all strangers, and has no mental faculty for distinguishing ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... made of the later Union, whatever theories may now be indulged in concerning the abstract Union the fathers made in 1789, the concrete Union which was put into effect was the offspring of the States not only in the thoughts of the people, but it was even dependent upon them for aid in several particulars necessary for putting it into operation. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... must imitate nature! yes, but what in nature,—all and every thing? No, the beautiful in nature. And what then is the beautiful? What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely ('formosum') with the vital. In the dead organic it depends on regularity of form, the first and lowest species of which is the triangle with all its modifications, as in crystals, architecture, &c.; in the living organic it is not mere regularity of form, which would ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... window to its fullest extent, threw his leg over the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which ran a leaded gutter, in the direction of the tower ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... on first page has been constructed for Port Alfred Harbor, this being one of several harbors now being made by Sir J. Coode in South Africa. The pier for the construction of which the crane will be employed will consist of concrete blocks laid on what is known as the "overend system." The blocks, being brought on trucks direct from the block yard to within the sweep of the machine, are raised by it, swung round, and accurately set, the machine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... the new camp at Valcartier I stood near the citadel in Quebec watching the moving lights on the St. Lawrence far below. As I looked the flashes of a powerful searchlight swept the river, lighting up the opposite shores and playing upon the craft in the river. This was the first concrete evidence I had that our country was at war; it was also a reminder that there was even a possibility that Quebec might ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... extent, the reservoir of the Cross was artificial. It had been constructed by throwing a deep stone and concrete dam across a narrow canyon through which there percolated, in summer, a small stream. Its cubic capacity was such, however, that when this reservoir was filled by spring freshets it contained water enough to run the full season round if sparingly used; and it was on this alone that the mill ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... journalism in West Africa is that fair play is unknown to it. The negroes may thoroughly identify themselves with England, claim a share in her greatness, and display abundant lip-loyalty; yet there is the racial aversion to Englishmen in the concrete, and to this is added the natural jealousy of seeing strangers monopolise the best appointments. The Sa Leonite openly declares that he and his can rule the land much better and more economically than the sickly foreigner, who spends half his service-time on board the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... far more subtle and revolutionising. Don Roberto was still hospitable, because it became a grandee so to be; but he had a Yankee major-domo who kept an account of every cent that was expended. He had no miserly love of gold in the concrete, but he had an abiding sense of its illimitable power, all of his brother-in-law's determination to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the country, and a ferocious hatred of poverty. He saw his old friends fall about him: advice did them no good, and any permanent alliance ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... could be drained; but at certain seasons of the year surface water would accumulate from the overflow of a milldam. But there is generally some way to overcome difficulties. In this case, the border was placed inside the house, and well raised, with a firm concrete bottom between the ground and water lines, and suitable drains connecting with the main drain under the front wall, to secure the requisite degree of dryness inside. Up to the present time we believe every thing has gone on very favorably. We have no doubt that many other places, ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... doth annoy me. Oh, the world has grown quite stupid! How they grope, and how they stumble, Over paths, to find what Truth is; Still in fog they are enveloped. To the first cause of all being We must needs go back, and bring the Last result of our researches In a concrete form together. Thus we comprehend the world well; For this purpose I am drinking Truly cosmogonically. Mundane space to me is nothing But a roomy vaulted cellar, Where as first and central wine-tun, Firmly stands the sun erected! ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... 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 was ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... whether such an analysis can help us to understand all that is meant by perception. This point will have to be touched later on. Here it is enough to say that, whatever our philosophy of perception may be, we must accept the psychological fact that the concrete mental state in the act of perception is built up out of elements, the history of which can be traced by the methods ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully |
