"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aspiration in his presence, we gain a strength to do our own part. If we abstain from prayer, if we limit our prayers to our own small desires, we grow, I know, petty and self-absorbed and feeble. We can leave the fulfilment of our concrete aims to God; but we ought to be always stretching out our hands and opening our hearts to the high and gracious mysteries that lie ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the window was a kind of two-story cake with frostin' all over the place—on top and down the sides, and on the bottom fur all I knew, it looked that rich. And it had cocoanut mixed in with it. Say, now, that concrete looked fit to pave the streets of the New Jerusalem with—and a hunk was cut out, jest like I'd always dream of so much—showin' a cross-section of rich yellow cake and a fruity-lookin' fillin' that jest made a man want to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... Whatever knowledge he possessed of death was connected with his mother. It was she who had given him his vague impression of another life. She herself, as she lay silent and unresponsive, had been the first concrete example of it. Inevitably thought of her came to him now,—practical, material thought, crowding from his brain the blind terror that had been its predecessor. Where was his mother now? He pictured again the furnace into which he had gazed from the mouth ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... arranged that I should retire gracefully and recommend my official successor to my American friends in a short speech. This I did with perfect good-will. But the Foreign Office, though they did not reckon without their host, had reckoned without his guests. When the concrete proposal (well-meant, I am sure) was made in all its glorious navet in a little speech by the new host, it was received with something like annoyance—a fact which worried me not a little, for I had, rather unwisely perhaps, assured ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... finance, insurance, structural concrete products, paints, perfumes, pharmaceuticals, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with my Philosopher. He is in the rosy dawn of expectation. The doors are opened, and he enters into an enchanted country. His eyes grow large as he looks about him. He sees visions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in all their bewildering, concrete variety. They are in barrels and boxes and paper bundles. They rise toward the sky in shelves that reach at last the height of the gloriously unattainable. He walks through the vales of Arcady, among pickles and cheeses. He lifts up his eyes wonderingly to snowy Olympus crowned ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... must enter into the closest union of the will with God. No longer a slave in anything he is the more a master of all, the more his will works in harmony with the one that rules the universe. "Placed between the abstract and the concrete, between the creative intelligence and the objective creation, man thus conceived, appears like the mediator par excellence, or the veritable Demiurge of the gnostics." Yet it is not enough that he gets light from its original source, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... "Nothing so concrete, I'm afraid," Wanhope gently returned. "I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. It's pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... chief industry of its population, for on all sides are to be seen the frames filled with the golden coloured strings of pasta that have been hung up to dry in the sunshine. Every flat roof in the place, moreover, is covered with smooth concrete and protected by a low parapet for the spreading of the grain, and on the beach are laid huge cloths of coarse brown material that are heaped with masses of the crude corn, whilst men with their naked feet from time to time turn the grain ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Numerous concrete and very emphatic reasons sprang to Quin's lips. He would have liked nothing better than to answer her question fully and finally; but instead he only smiled at ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... set among the nations, not as a dark lantern, but as the great lampstand in the Temple court proclaimed, to ray out light to all the world. Jonah's mission was but a concrete instance of Israel's charge. The nation was as reluctant to fulfil the reason of its existence as the Prophet was. Both begrudged sharing privileges with heathen dogs, both thought God's care wasted, and neither had such feelings towards the rest of the world as to be willing to be messengers ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the head ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... jubilation and jumping high in the air at every other step, Astro raced out of the gigantic maintenance hangar at the Venusport spaceport and charged at his two unit mates waiting on the concrete apron. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire 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 of varied songs, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... wall which the slaves were repairing was built of great blocks of artificial stone or concrete, which were previously cast in wooden moulds, left to harden, and then put into their assigned places by slave-labour. As Foster was watching the conveyance of these blocks, it suddenly occurred to him that Hester ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... will not go off in good intentions and benevolent sentiments. The Corinthians were ready with their 'willing' on Titus's previous visit. Now Paul desires them to put their good feelings into concrete shape. There is plenty of benevolence that never gets to be beneficence. The advice here has a very wide application: 'As there was the readiness to will, so there may be the completion also.' We all know where the road leads that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... 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
... cases only. Nothing will make me believe that an acre or so of concrete enclosure will make up to a wolf or a tiger-cat for the range of night prowling that would belong to it in a wild state. Think of the dictionary of sound and scent and recollection that unfolds before a real wild beat as it comes out from its lair every evening, with the knowledge that in a few ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... romances, but personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it. Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor. Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... a party of three men should travel to Cape Crozier from winter quarters during the winter months in order to secure emperor penguins' eggs. The ship was to call at Cape Crozier, land provisions, and erect a small hut of fibro-concrete sheets for the use of this party. The ship was off the Cape on the afternoon of January 9, and a boat put off with Stenhouse, Cope, Joyce, Ninnis, Mauger, and Aitken to search for a landing-place. "We steered in towards the Barrier," wrote ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... foundation walls were pointed up and repaired, and were strengthened by the addition of several new footings. Across the back (west end) of the building, the crawl space was deepened to a uniform 3 feet, and four 12 x 12 inch brick piers were placed on concrete footings. In the center section of the courthouse, the basement walls were extended 1 foot to carry the joists of the new floor, the outside entrance was closed up, and a new staircase for the interior entrance ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... river there too; not a little bolt of chatoyant silk like the Avon, which they would have called a "crick" back there. Before Carthage ran the incomprehensible floods of old Mississippi himself, Father of Waters, deep and vast and swift. They had lately swung a weir across it to make it work—a concrete wall a mile wide and more, and its tumbling cascades spun no little mill wheels, but swirled thundering turbines that lighted cities and ran street cars a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... geological character of the land that we have found now encompassing this sea. Why, if the 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
... appeared to be meditating. Howard's angry thoughts were racing. Rage baffled was but baffled again. There seemed nothing concrete that he could lay his hands on; again Jim Courtot had come and gone. To drive the men off the land, even could he succeed in doing it would so far as he could see be barren of any desired result. There was a law in the country, and that law would see the man through who had properly ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... city wall a broad concrete walk; along this walk seats, trees, and rude statues; and between the walk and the wall ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... learned from Bishop Butler, whom he reverenced profoundly and spoke of as "the Copernicus of ethics," that there is no practice more fatal to moral strength than dreaming divorced from action. Some concrete act, some definite thing to be done, was now always in his mind, but always, it may be added, as the realisation of some principle arrived at by serious and accurate thinking. He had acquired clear convictions, his powers of application ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Englanders are perhaps the leanest of his descendants, because we have forsaken too much the old ways and habits of the race, and given ourselves too much to abstractions and transcendentalism. The old Teuton abhorred the abstract. He loved the concrete, the substantial. The races of Southern Europe, what are now called the Latin races, were more temperate than the Teutonic, but they were far less brave, honest, and manly. Their sensuality might not be so boisterous, but it was more bestial and foul. Strength and manliness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... clear openings. The piers carrying the girders are formed of columns 8ft. in diameter sunk through the sand down to solid rock, which was reached at a depth of about 90 feet below high water mark. The columns are steel cylinders filled with concrete, and were sunk into position by means of compressed air on the diving bell principle, and owing to the depth below water at high tide, the men excavating inside were finally working under a pressure of three atmospheres, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... Barkilphedro was discreet, secret, concrete. He kept in everything and racked himself with his hate. Enormous baseness implies enormous vanity. He was liked by those whom he amused, and hated by all others; but he felt that he was disdained by those who hated him, and despised by those who liked him. He restrained himself. All his ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the past find their finished realization, their perfect fulfilment. Thenceforward the name of Nelson is enrolled among those few presented to us by History, the simple mention of which suggests, not merely a personality or a career, but a great force or a great era concrete in a single man, who is its ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... a sense, sacred from the profanation of too utilitarian progress. 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 our old, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... the subject as though it were the first part of the definition, viz. the genus; but we give it the second place, which is that of the difference; thus we say that simitas is "a curvature of the nose." But if we take accidents in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates at the accident: for "a white thing" is "something that has whiteness." Accordingly in defining this kind of accident, we place the subject as the genus, which is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN that Edwin May, of Indianapolis, the well-known architect of our county jail, had taken letters patent on a fire-proof lath for ceilings and inside partition walls, together with a concrete floor for the protection of the upper edge of the joist which by actual test had been demonstrated to be fire-proof. After a critical examination of the invention upon its merits, it was adopted, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Washington excelled rather as a critic of concrete plans than of constitutional and legal aspects. Perhaps this is true. Assuredly he had no formal legal training. There were many other men in Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in some of the other ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... great commonwealth. Incidents and happenings which have passed from public record will still live in the memory of those who played a part. The wonderful rehabilitation period, with all that it meant of physical and mental suffering, but typifies today in concrete, stone and brick the sturdy and stalwart spirit of those men who were made absolute pioneers by the ash heap of 1906. Some of these have gone to their last accounting, but for those who are still serving, and still tugging at the oar, there remains ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... the new sophistry both by speech and writing. So few people have any intellectual grip that everything may depend on the leadership of a few men like yourself, who can speak with knowledge and authority, and will take the trouble to put concrete facts ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... in feeling and applies equally to men and women. Man is a competitive-social animal and competes in everything, from the cleverness and beauty of his children to the excellence of his taste in hats. Money has the advantage of being the symbol of value, of being concrete and definite, and of having the ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... in any case, she was an expert swimmer. What could it be? Immediately following her cry came Sholto's deep bay, and then I saw her. She was standing on a tall, white, lozenge-shaped rock, that looked almost as if it had been carefully shaped in concrete. She was kneeling, and her arm was across her face. With a cry I dashed into the river, and floundered across, sometimes almost up to my neck, and ran stumbling to her in a blind agony of fear. Even as I ran her rod was carried past me, and ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... some extent from the Dutch papers in Cape Colony and the Transvaal, but in a much fuller and more substantial form from the Continental papers, notably the Parisian Press. On the other hand, our own journalists have not been altogether free from this taint. Let us take one or two concrete instances, e.g., violation of the white flag, firing on ambulances, the use of "explosive" bullets, looting. Just after the first reverse at the Tugela, a correspondent wired home that the Boers were ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... youth had in his despair made such a fierce assault on his jailers that, despite his chains, he had well-nigh strangled three of them before he was effectually secured. He was therefore condemned to be buried alive in one of the huge square blocks of concrete with which the walls of a part of the fortifications were being ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... kinds of thinking. In the example we first think the picture presented by the words; that is, we make a mental image of the little band of Scots, hand in hand, trying to ford the swiftly flowing waters of the swollen river. This is called concrete thinking. At the same time we form some judgment based on the picture. We think of the great determination and courage these men showed in struggling forward in spite of the danger. This is called abstract thinking. But, as we have said, a reader does more ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... variety, and altogether different to the pictured frontier village. There were no one-storied square fronts, no rows of saloons with well-gnawed hitching-rails, no rioting cowboys. On the contrary, the larger buildings were of artificial stone, the sidewalks of concrete, and the store fronts of plate-glass. Arc-lights shed a bluish-white glare over the wide street-crossings, and all in all the effect was much like that of a prosperous, orderly Northern ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... this character is the ground of our present abbreviations y'e the, y't that, y's this, &c. the y in these cases being evidently only an altered and more modern way of writing . [5] vyaund. This word is to be understood in the concrete, quasi vyander, a curious epicure, an Apicius. V. Preface. [6] csten ynges. Christian kings. K being to be inserted afterwards (v. note [1] and [3]) in red ink. Chaucer, v. christen. [7] and. Read ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... dragged on a cigarette and sent a swirl of smoke upward through the heavy humid air. Then he would just lie there watching as the smoke crept up to mingle with the large drops of water that were forming on the concrete of the command post. ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... them, will occasion a certain and most painful death. They have the like uniformity in the counsels they give us for the regimen of life: it is good to make water often; for we experimentally see that, in letting it lie long in the bladder, we give it time to settle the sediment, which will concrete into a stone; it is good not to make water often, for the heavy excrements it carries along with it will not be voided without violence, as we see by experience that a torrent that runs with force washes the ground it rolls over much cleaner than the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... if anyone, small or grown up, can understand this: "It was indeed a higher kind of impressionism that Monet originated, one that reveals a vivid rendering, not of the natural and concrete facts, but of their influence upon the spirit when they are wrapped in the infinite diversities of that impalpable, immaterial, universal medium which we call light, when the concrete loses itself in the abstract, and what is of time and matter impinges on ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... concrete as Fig. 39. This requires a mold or form, and takes considerable planning to insure success. A form is made whose inside dimensions are those of the outside of the bird house, and of the desired shape. A second form, or core, to be placed inside of the first form, is made ...
— Bird Houses Boys Can Build • Albert F. Siepert
... designations, though their significance is lost. When first introduced they had a strictly literal meaning. Alchemy, with its essences, quintessences, and spirits, was Pantheism materialized. God was seen to be in everything, in the abstract as well as the concrete, in numbers as ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... it the same way, in my case. I kept getting 'em wrong, they said. They'd meant it in the abstract, applied to me. 'But what about the wages of sin, in my case?' Had they been abstract there? 'Death—the gutter.' That was concrete, wasn't it? It sounded like bedrock to me. Then they wanted to ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.—John ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... regard, and national taste, such a tempest of loyalty has set in upon the people that the 47th proposition in Euclid might now be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and therefore if Lord Hawkesbury hates the abstract truths of science as much as he hates concrete truth in human affairs, now is his time for getting rid of the multiplication table, and passing a vote of censure upon the pretensions of the hypotenuse. Such is the history of English parties at this moment: you cannot seriously suppose ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... they say, is worth a pound of precept. So a single concrete case of a fierce vegetable campaign now actually in progress over all Northern Europe may help to make my meaning a trifle clearer. Till very lately the forests of the north were largely composed in places ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... story of her achievement. The growth of an artist is an intellectual and spiritual development which can scarcely be followed in a personal narrative. This story attempts to deal only with the simple and concrete beginnings which color and accent an artist's work, and to give some account of how a Moonstone girl found her way out of a vague, easy-going world into a life of disciplined endeavor. Any account of the loyalty ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the 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 ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... text. It seems to be more in consonance, therefore, with the archaic style of the whole narrative, and to yield a profounder and worthier meaning, if we recognise the boldness of the metaphor, and take 'sin' as the subject of the whole. Now all this puts in concrete, metaphorical shape, suited to the stature of the bearers, great and solemn truths. Let us try to translate them into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... researches appearing likely to prove fruitful, I resolved to apply them to the study of concrete instances, and was thus led to deal with the Psychology of Revolutions—notably that ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... annoy you with another letter. But since I addressed you last week I have received one or two communications—not from you, bien entendu, for you are too wary to dispute the accuracy of what I have written; but from concrete human beings, who pretend to speak on your behalf, and deny that I have "proved my case." I might answer by saying that I never set out to prove a case—that I wished merely to enjoy a friendly chat with you, and to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... this theoretical moral teaching, in these punishments and anger! Is it credible that, by the aid of abstract and arid dogmas supported by punishment, conscience and altruistic sentiments can be impressed on the brain of a child, which is only accessible to concrete ideas, to sympathy, affection and amusement? We may see daily, in nearly every family, parents finding fault with their children, in a vexatious, irritated or sorrowful tone of voice, to which the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... fortunes were cast in the United States, did it not behoove me to draw upon the country's increasing prosperity and to help to increase it? Texas did not matter. I did not fancy the institution of slavery. It grated upon my sensibilities; but I had a very slight understanding of it in the concrete. I was glad that England was rid of it. I had never admired the Wesleys, the Methodists; but I was glad to give them credit for what they had done to relieve England of such an abomination. I rejoiced that more than seven years before I was born Clarkson and Wilberforce had brought ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... together, are wedged into the foundations, and slope inwards and upwards to within a few feet of the height to which it is intended to carry the digue. On the top another solid bed of branches is laid down, and the whole is first covered with concrete, and then with bricks or tiles, while the edge of the digue, at the top of the seaward slope, is composed of heavy blocks of stone cemented together and bound ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... Battles of Dorking, and the like—I learn from Mr. Peddie, the bibliographer, over one 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
... he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... was not quite sure what an island might be like in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy's voice ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... chloroform. The last process undoubtedly furnishes products most nearly resembling the natural floral odours, and is the only one which does not destroy the delicate fragrance of the violet and jasmine. The yield, however, is extremely small, and concrete perfumes prepared in this way are therefore ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... of local concentration that may presently change that greyness into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted colours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In the course of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take a few concrete glimpses of households, costumes, conveyances, and conveniences of the coming time, but only as incidental realizations of points in this general thesis. And now, assuming, as we must necessarily do, the soundness of these earlier speculations, we have ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... he said. "Nothing like that in my geology book. And what is beyond? Looks like concrete work, as if someone had plastered up the cave." He picked his way quickly across the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Delafield has already, upon a small scale, made some very successful experiments of curvilineal dikes, constructed with caissons of concrete; and we have no doubt that, with adequate means at his disposal, this ingenious engineer could avert the dangers which threaten, not only the fort, but the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... organisation are completed now, the discussion of all its general difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, fine buildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that I may look too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete and individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of realisation, but the swimming moment of opacity before the film gives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 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 from ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... a reconciliation of these two conceptions will be found in a clear recognition of the two modes in which God is apprehended and consequently loved by the human mind and heart; the one concrete and experimental, accessible to the simplest and least cultured, and of necessity for all; the other, abstract in a sense—a knowledge through the ideas and representations of the mind, demanding a certain degree of intelligence and studious contemplation, and therefore not necessary, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... out of their mud huts, and removed them into comfortable dwellings which he had built for their accommodation. When he returned to his estate, he was greatly disappointed. The houses were as untidy and uncomfortable as before. The pig was still under the bed, and the hens over it. The concrete floor was as dirty as the mud one had been. The panes of the windows were broken, and the garden was full of weeds. The landlord wrote to a friend in despair. The friend replied, "You have begun at the wrong end. You ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... intervals of their devotions in this manner, but to the general run of people the thing is unknown. Yet a more entertaining way of spending a half-holiday—having regard to current taste—it should be difficult to imagine. An empty house is realistic literature in the concrete, full of hints and allusions if a little wanting in tangible humanity, and it outdoes the modern story in its own line, by beginning as well as ending in a note of interrogation. That it is not more extensively followed I can ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... breeder-reactors clustered in a circle inside a windowless concrete building at the center of the plant. Beside their primary purpose of plutonium production, they furnished heat for the sea-water distillation and chemical extraction system, processing the water that was run through ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... and I perceive you have a tendency that way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of sentiment perhaps, but no slumgullion about political economy nor social strata or such stuff. Make it concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life, ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... to blot. You mistake your heart if you think you can write a lampoon. Your whips are rods of roses. [1] Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the vicious,—abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a compliment as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. But do not lug me into the same soreness of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the room beside her own; she had had a half-conscious vision in the moment of waking of a shadowy something that had seemed to fade away by the window. As the actual reality of this thought pierced through the sleep that dulled her brain and became a concrete suggestion, she sprang out of the bed and ran on to the balcony. It was empty. She leaned over the railing, listening intently, but she could see nothing and hear nothing. Puzzled, she went back into her room and turned on the lights. Nothing seemed ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... sketch of the nocturnal funeral train, proved vain. Each one's fancy silently carried out the picture further; they saw the body itself on the stretcher; the bier was depicted with distinctness as if it were a concrete token of the mysterious deed; a carpenter even drew it in chalk in bold strokes on the wall of the court-house. A woman who suffered from insomnia stated that she was sitting at the window that night and in ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... explains these differences. The concrete of our buildings is obtained by the simultaneous manipulation of gravel and mortar. In the same way, the Spider mixes the cement of the silk with the grains of sand; the spinnerets never cease working, while the legs fling under the adhesive spray the solid materials collected in the immediate ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... 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
... of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea, which idea is a ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... book might 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... as a bottle is tossed in a chopping sea? I reply that it all depends on myself. Rosalind would say no; that we are without control over love. But Rosalind was a woman. It is probably true that a woman cannot conquer love. Man, being her ideal in the abstract, is irresistible to her in the concrete. But man, being an intellectual creature, can make a magnificent effort and cast love out. Should I think it advisable, I do not question my ability to open the gates of my heart and bid her go. That would ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... Hill would have the modern poet profit by another quality of Biblical style: its magic combination of a "magnificent Plainness" with the "Spirit of Imagery." This is the Hebrew virtue of concrete suggestiveness, so highly prized by 20th-century critics and so alien to the generalized abstractions and the explicit clarity of ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... the master brain behind all this? This crime to-night bore glaring evidence to the work of some far-flung, intricate and powerful organisation—the Tocsin was indubitably right in that. Was this the first concrete expression he had had of that undercurrent he had sensed of late as permeating the underworld, that he had sensed was reaching out as one of its objects for him ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... 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
... Gumthorpe comes forward and gazes at the jumbled debris. He is conscious of a sense of despairing conflict—the conflict between contemplative amazement and some natural but well-controlled demand for concrete action. An appalling conviction comes to him that he ought to do something. Under the fallen mess of brick, marble, and wood there are feeble undulations. A phrase keeps running through his mind—"Expressing her primitive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... as of any of the other acute infections. We do not now need to enquire into the theory of how this comes about; it is a well-recognized natural phenomenon. The modern explanation is in terms of antigens and anti-bodies and is fast passing from the stage of pure biochemical hypothesis into that of concrete realization. Persons who have recovered from smallpox rarely take it a second time; the few who do, have it in a mild form. It follows, then, that if smallpox is purposely inoculated into a human being he will for a long ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... natural science in the sixteenth century brought the possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit—in the embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober naturalists there were speculative dreamers ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... 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 powers of water, and composite monsters or dragons were invented ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... concrete amusement for the public always imagine ourselves much better known to that public than we are, Miss West. It's our little vanity—rather harmless after all. We're a pretty decent lot, sometimes ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... as a practical and easy-going soul, but she was essentially a woman of fine and vigorous moral and mental purpose. Like many of her associates in active life, however, she had become too occupied with concrete possibilities to be able to give much thought to her own soul anatomy, and she was glad to look up to her brother's wife as a spiritual superior and to recognize that the burden lay on herself to demonstrate her own worthiness to be admitted to close ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... The Law of Balance in Life 8. The Application of the Law of Causation to Morals 9. The Retribution in the Past, the Present, and the Future Life 10. The Eternal Life as taught by Professor M?nsterberg 11. Life in the Concrete 12. Difficulties are no Match for an Optimist 13. Do Thy Best and Leave the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Murna. The bank-barn was forty feet high. On its lee side, Aaron had nailed thin, horizontal strips of wood about a foot apart, hoping to encourage the mud-daubing birds he'd seen on the wall at Datura to plaster their nests onto his barn, and shop for insects in his fields. Lacking concrete, he'd constructed a roofless stone hut abutting the barn to serve as his manure shed. The farmhouse itself was a bit gay, having an inside toilet to cheat the Murnan winters and a sunporch for Martha's bacteriological equipment. As the nearest Amish Volle Diener—Congregational ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... your father an mother. Tell em I simpathize with them in there loss. Its no use ritin any more cause Im firm as the rock of Gibber Alter. Concrete. Thats me ...
— Dere Mable - Love Letters Of A Rookie • Edward Streeter
... "Keep it concrete and fitted to the intelligence of your audience."—I watched the Hon. Cy, and never said a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... concrete and fastidious, His nose is remarkably big; His visage is more or less hideous, His beard it ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... into New York harbor first have to pass the line of terrible guns that, back of the earth and concrete defenses, look frowningly out to sea. ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... and the occasional pouring of them, which throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the soles ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... passion for pink-scented 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
... Yellin' Kid and Snake Purdee had seen evidences of the raid, and it was long past noon when the boys reached it. They had stopped for "grub" on the way, having carried with them some food. Water they could get from one of the several concrete troughs that had been installed, the fluid coming through ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... Hillsborough's letter, and never had been so bad as now; in view of which fact ministers could not but think it wise to maintain some tax as a matter of principle purely. They would therefore recommend that the tax on tea, no burden certainly on anyone, be continued as a concrete application of the right of Parliament to tax ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... knelt on silently for some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the boy's eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager, concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not pretend that I had any lofty aims or ambitions, felt any regard for its dignity or fascination for the mysteries of its science when I selected it for my profession. My objects were practical—my ambition to get the largest financial return consonant with the least amount of work. My one concrete experience of the law had opened my eyes to its possibilities in a way that I had never dreamed of, and I resolved to lose no time in placing myself in a position to rescue others from harm on the same pecuniary ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... Universities came into existence and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern Magnum Opus have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us how "the glorious fellowship of living men," which constituted the personal University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by slow degrees into the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... material to secure stability than the octagonal and still less than the square; on the other hand, there is more liability to cracking. Brick is the material commonly used, but many chimneys are now made of iron or steel. Reinforced concrete ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of Moliere. In dealing with historical writings he recognises the importance of the study of governments, institutions, and social life, and at the same time values highly a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his rare gifts of intellect and of the soul was added an inexpressible personal charm, in which something that was almost feminine was united with the reserved power ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... trees, not even the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished—yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... three meals a day and no more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times—coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)—a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... individual soon wearied of expiring patriots, who all appeared to be quitting their earthly tabernacles in convulsions, ruffled shirts, and a whirl of torn banners, bomb shells, and buff and blue arms and legs. The statuary also was massive and concrete, but rather wearying to examine; for the colossal ladies and gentlemen, carried no cards of introduction in face or figure; so, whether the meditative party in a kilt, with well-developed legs, shoes like army slippers, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... Great Bath is a rectangular tank 111 feet by 68 feet, originally lined with lead 1/4 inch thick. It was surrounded with dressing-rooms, from which steps led down to the water. The great hall which contained it was covered in with a roof of hollow bricks and concrete (plentiful specimens of which lie scattered about), supported by carved columns. On the left is another square bath with a semi-circular tank at each end, and a series of vapour chambers behind it. The greater part of this bath was unfortunately ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Mr Artis," said the old lawyer—"a vault in which is a tomb. This," he continued, "is all of enormous strength, blocks of stone and concrete being beneath us, and the walls and roof are of immense thickness. The space to be blocked ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... unsatisfactory vagueness in what I have been attempting to indicate may perhaps be in a measure dissipated by a direct appeal to concrete experience. When one analyses this emotion of love in relation to any actual human object I think it becomes clear that in our attitude to the physical body of the person we love there is a profound ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... drove on, through, endless boulevards, some bustling, some dingy, some tawdry and flaring, some melancholy and mean; rows of garden gods, planted on the walls of yards full of vases and divinities of concrete, huge railway halls, monster hotels, dissenting chapels in the form of Gothic churches, quaint ancient almshouses that were once built in the fields, and tea-gardens and stingo-houses and knackers' yards. They were in a district far beyond ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... bearing family problems. Your sister Marietta 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 ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... floor, which doubtless was innocent enough, but turned quickly up a flight of steps. At the foot of the broad staircase Kennedy paused to examine some rich carvings, and I felt him nudge me. I turned. It was an enclosed staircase, with walls that looked to be of re-enforced concrete. Swung back on hinges concealed like those of a modern burglar-proof safe was ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Jehovist is terse, graphic, and poetic; it is this source in which occurs the fine description of the sending forth of the raven and the dove, viii. 6-12. It knows how to make a singularly effective use of concrete details: witness Noah putting out his hand and pulling the dove into the ark, and her final return with an olive leaf in her mouth. A similarly graphic touch, interesting also for the sidelight it throws on the Jehovist's theological conceptions is that, when ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... in general must wait, seeing that our particular one stands clamoring for solution. The concrete bids away with the abstraction. None of our friends of this history could be brought just now, for a single moment, to seek solace in philosophy, unless it might be Professor Blatherwick—and he is entirely oblivious of the fact of the crisis ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... when imported from France, fell flat upon the average Englishman. He was eager enough to discuss the utility of this or that part of the machinery, but without inquiring into first principles of mechanism. The argument from 'utility' deals with concrete facts, and presupposes an acceptance of some common criterion of the useful. The constant discussion of political matters in parliament and the press implied a tacit acceptance on all hands of constitutional methods. Practical men, asking whether this or that policy shall be adopted in view of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... agitation. There was the widespread revolution of the Latin countries, beginning with France and Portugal, chiefly against Authority, and most of all against Monarchy (since Monarchy is the most vivid and the most concrete embodiment of authority); and in Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon countries against Capital and Aristocracy. It was in these years that Socialism came most near to dominating the civilized world; and, indeed, you will ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... storm still continues. A large concrete block, weighing 300 tons, has been dislodged, and the whole building seems doomed unless the storm abates ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... made her a present there was nothing of this kind to discard. It had been part of his non-committal, impersonal attitude toward her that he had never given her a concrete sign that she meant anything to him whatever. He had thanked her on occasions for the comforting quality he found in her presence. He had, in so many words, recognized the fact that when he got into a tantrum of nerves she could bring him out of it as no one else had ever done. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Carrying her message far: Shaping her dream Within the brain of steam, That, with a myriad hands, Labors unceasingly, and knits her lands In firmer union; joining plain and stream With steel; and binding shore to shore With bands of iron;—nerves and arteries, Along whose adamant forever pour Her concrete thoughts, her tireless energies. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... hugged themselves with delight when by a disastrous stroke of statesmanship Great Britain exchanged the crumbling island of Heligoland for some millions of square miles of undeveloped territory hitherto held by Germany. While Heligoland was being protected by massive concrete walls and armed by huge guns to form a practically impregnable bulwark to the North Sea coast of Germany, England was by peaceful methods developing her new African acquisition. Germany could then afford to wait until the favourable opportunity and by force of arms seize and ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... miscellaneous work, mostly of the compilation order, the play of the Good-natured Man began to assume concrete form; insomuch that Johnson, always the friend of this erratic Irishman, had promised to write a Prologue for it. It is with regard to this Prologue that Boswell tells a foolish and untrustworthy story ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... Protestant factions by a French garrison. In the natural course of events, the Scottish Protestant party looked to England for support, and favoured in the abstract the idea of uniting the English and Scottish crowns, though in the concrete they would not admit an English King. All Scottish sentiment, without distinction of party, rebelled against any prospect of Scotland becoming an appanage of any foreign Power, and the idea of subordination to France was only less unpopular ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... had paused in her work, slop-basin in hand. The concrete details were beginning to ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... with its steeply-pitched roof, is a favourite subject for artists. Beyond it are concrete courts, walls of glazed white brick, and cleanly substantial buildings, which speak of the modern appreciation of sanitation. A tablet on the wall records in admirably concise fashion the history of the Mercers' School and its various peregrinations until it ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... are of Roman concrete; the architects amalgamated it for me after the best accounts ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... roll in by the West Pier, and at the bottom of East Street. Both sides of the West Pier are washed by larger waves than can be seen all along the coast from the Quarter Deck. Great rollers come in at the concrete groyne at the foot of East Street. Exposed as the coast is, the waves do not convey so intense an idea of wildness, confusion, and power as they do at Dover. To see waves in their full vigour go to the Admiralty Pier and watch the seas broken by the granite ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... university, and his father—a striking replica of Arnaud's prejudices, impatience and fundamental kindness—exchanged with Vigne's male parent the most dismal prophecies together with concrete plans for their children's future security. This, inevitably, resulted in Vigne's marriage; a ceremony unattended by Pleydon except by the presence of a ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer |
