"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... see the importance of the scarab in the scheme of things. The opinion she formed of Mr. Peters was of his being an eccentric old gentleman, making a great to-do about nothing at all. Losses had to have a concrete value before they could impress Joan. It was beyond her to grasp that Mr. Peters would sooner have lost a diamond necklace, if he had happened to possess one, than his Cheops of the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the principles of the all-important controversy, in which the life of a universe is involved, the author has set it before us in great, concrete object-lessons of ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... and silence, and I realised that I saw, if not materially yet in thought, and recognised then, that all the qualities of matter, the sounds, the colours, the scents—all that depends upon material vibration—were abstracted from it; while form, of which the idea exists in the mind apart from all concrete manifestations, was still present. For some time after that, a series of these crystalline globes passed through the atmosphere where I dwelt, some near, some far; and I saw in an instant, in each case, the life and history of each. Some were still all aflame, mere currents of molten heat and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... concrete thoughts were lost in one tremendous throbbing ache, which was in the back of my head at first, but spread slowly down the spine, until at last my whole body felt as if it had been ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... living room at the north end of the house. Two figures chased one another around the centre table—Ditmar's children! Was Ditmar there? Impelled irresistibly by a curiosity overcoming repugnance and fear, she went forward slowly across the street, gained the farther pavement, stepped over the concrete coping, and stood, shivering violently, on the lawn, feeling like an interloper and a thief, yet held by morbid fascination. The children continued to romp. The boy was strong and swift, the girl stout and ungainly in her movements, not mistress of her body; he caught her and twisted ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... finally edged her Renault up on the "on" ramp and the freeway stretched straight and unobstructed ahead, she stepped down on the accelerator and watched the needle climb up and past the legal 65-mile limit. The sound of her tires on the smooth concrete was soothing and the rush of wind outside gave the morning an illusion of coolness. She edged away from the tangle of cars that had pulled onto the freeway with her and momentarily was alone on the road, with her rear-view mirror blank, the ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... communicated to new particles of matter vitally united to the living plant, in a like continued organization conformable to that sort of plants. For this organization, being at any one instant in any one collection of matter, is in that particular concrete distinguished from all other, and IS that individual life, which existing constantly from that moment both forwards and backwards, in the same continuity of insensibly succeeding parts united to the living body of the plant, it has that identity which makes the same plant, and ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... into the water. The Oxonians were the first to show a lead, and at the Creek ["Creek" scratched out and nothing substituted] were a foot to the good. The Craydle is a pleasing river with banks running up from the sea to slopes up the Concrete Wall this advantage was fully maintained ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... subtending consciousness, bind him, though seemingly separate, to the mighty life of humanity, his greater self, and these are the chords which, when 'Love took up the harp of life,'... 'passed in music out of sight.' In woman humanity is enshrined and made concrete for the homage of man. This is the mighty indwelling which causes her to suggest something more august than herself, and invests her with an ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... power within us yearning for expression, hence the well-planned school will provide simple forms of manual training by means of which both boys and girls will be taught to use their hands so skillfully that they may translate an idea into a concrete product. ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... hand, I wandered over the vessel. It was reassuringly solid and concrete. And yet there ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... steady foundation upon which her heart could safely build. He would not, could not, ever fail her. This had been sufficient to stay her longing for sight and speech of him, her longing for his bodily presence. But now, in face of the very concrete facts of the island, the inn, which bore his name and where his mother lived and ruled, of the property he owned, the place and people to which—by half at least of his nature and much more than half his memory—he belonged, the comfort of this spiritual esoteric ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... which aircraft and submarines were always starting. For weeks beforehand the crews that had volunteered to go on this desperate adventure were carefully trained in secret. The plan was to block the mouth of the Bruges Canal, by sinking three vessels filled with concrete, while the Vindictive smashed up the batteries on the mole (long solid wharf) guarding the entrance, and an old submarine, loaded like a gigantic torpedo, blew up the supports for the bridge that connected ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... heard her slippers shuffling over the concrete. She arrived in a brilliant blue nylon robe, with white fluffy slippers and traces of a lighter blue nightgown underneath. The hangar brightness brought a frown to her eyes, which she shielded with a hand cupped to her brow. A creature as entrancing as that, Grant decided, should now ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... stone for the sea-wall that Babcock was building for the Lighthouse Department had lain three days at the government dock without a bucket having been swung across her decks. His foreman had just reported that there was not enough material to last the concrete-mixers two hours. If Grogan did not begin work at once, the divers ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it was before. It was a marvelous mind that produced it. As a mental tour de force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete, and the occult." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... large concrete or natural rock water catchments collect rainwater (no longer used for drinking water) ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... pointed out previously, such exhaustive scientific training naturally tends to make the mind mathematical. It cannot be satisfied unless its surroundings—the substantial realisation of the concrete-are perfect. So Mr. Phillip had a suit for every purpose—for football, cricket, tennis, bicycle, shooting, dining, and strolling about. In the same way he possessed a perfect armoury of athletic ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... always talking of this offensive. They had heard that it was under way. Yet, how were they to know the truth? The newspapers gave vague hints; gossip carried others, more concrete, sometimes correct but usually incorrect; and all that the women and the old men and the children at home could do was to keep on with the work. And this they did; it is instinct. Then one morning ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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 ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... appropriate, and rich expression. Its pictured words and sentences placed the things described, and thoughts that breathe, in living form before the reader's eye and mind. It was vivid, rich, melodious; in its general character strikingly concrete and objective; a charm to the ear, a delight to the imagination; copious and infinitely flexible; free and graceful in movement and structure, having at the beginning passed over the chords of the lyre, and been modulated ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... 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 Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... It was a pity that Hilary always so disliked any work he had to do. Work—a terrific, insatiable god, demanding its hideous human sacrifices from the dawn of the world till twilight—so Hilary saw it. The idea of being horrible, all the concrete details into which it was translated ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... much to be said for Anarchy in the abstract, nothing at all in the concrete. Mr. Smillie, however, appears to favour it, raw, rough and ready. In that he is precocious, and, like the rathe primrose, will "forsaken die." He will rend the Labour party in twain from the top to the bottom, and will see the agricultural vote drop off his industrials just as it ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the winter in different fashion, according to their temperaments. There were some who never could have faced a second winter with any degree of cheerfulness, but taking it all round, we did well enough, and when summer came again our concrete keenness and zeal had not one whit abated. That is especially true in the case of those who were chosen to make the great journey southward, even though it was obvious that certain members could only accompany their leader for a mere fraction of the ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... could raise it. The knowledge that Frenchy had shot a man did not trouble him in the least, so long as the accompanying circumstances and the motive were in accordance with the simple standards of Manicaland. Here came in the doubt, engendered by nothing more concrete or citable than a trifle of mystery in the man's manner, and some undefined quality that disagreed with the trader. He glanced over to him; the Frenchman was blowing rings of smoke and smiling at them. There was nothing in his face but innocent ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... its walls so thick that the middle ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like seared rocks, yet still suggesting their original shapes as shrines, cippi, and sarcophagi. There is a wondrous succession of high reliefs figuring ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... another farm down in Iowa, whose owner had tried to make his place conspicuous by putting a concrete wall and gateway in front of his house, and making lavish use of white paint in decorating his buildings and grounds. He succeeded, but I cannot help thinking that if he had put the money that useless concrete work cost into shrubbery and vines, it would have made his ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... should take external or concrete form it has to be married, as it were, to some desire or tendency in the individual. Reverend George Ripley had become imbued with Fourierism through his studies of French philosophy, but he had also been brought up on a farm, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... But most remained as a weak liquor of comment upon which floated a hard cake of undigested narrative. One student found a bit of closely reasoned criticism that argued from definite evidences to a concrete conclusion. It was irreducible; but this was ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of Washington be with us today, not only because this is our Bicentennial Inauguration, but because Washington remains the Father of our Country. And he would, I think, be gladdened by this day; for today is the concrete expression of a stunning fact: our continuity these 200 years since ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... is thick and dark; my second is connected with the sea; my whole is an acid concrete salt, or some one ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... 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 ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... of concrete," says The National News, "are now quite common in America." The only complaint, it appears, is that some of them are just a trifle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... the tide at the flood," says James. These interests reveal the fact that in this period, instruction should deal with things, not with statements of ideas, apart from things, or, in other words, with the concrete, not the abstract. ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... way down to his laboratory he pretended to read the news, but could not succeed in interesting himself in the wars and famines of the world, so much more vital and absorbing were his own passions and retreats, so filmy was the abstract, so concrete and vital the particular. A million children might be starving in India, a thousand virgins about to be sold to slavery in Turkestan; but such intelligence counted little to a man struggling with doubt ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... worked like real bankers And claimed "three days of grace;" Then we figured "hare and greyhound" In their leaping, jaunty race; We desired an illustration Of the problems to be solved, As no concrete computation From ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... "The most concrete impulse that now favors socialism in this country is the insane purpose to deprive labor organizations of the full and complete rights that go with ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... "Keep it concrete and fitted to the intelligence of your audience."—I watched the Hon. Cy, and never said a thing ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... a cloud, and he could see clearly the cruel trap into which he had accidentally stumbled. A pile of old boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete ...
— The Hoofer • Walter M. Miller
... and concrete work. I learned it by doing it. I followed concrete work for a long time. I've hoped to build several houses here in Pine Bluff and a lot ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... good, one in which the permanent well-being of self includes the well-being of others also. This is the germ of morality, the development of which yields, first, a gradual extension of the area of common good, and secondly, a fuller and more concrete determination of its content. Further representatives of this movement are W. Wallace, Adamson, Bradley; A. Seth is ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... incumbent on the national defense, it will be noted, the offenses or discrepancies to be guarded against or corrected by recourse to arms have much of a ceremonial character. Whatever may be the material accidents that surround any given concrete grievance that comes up for appraisal and redress, in bringing the case into the arena for trial by combat it is the spiritual value of the offense that is played up and made the decisive ground of action, particularly ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... relation of the Son to the Father as we find it explained by Clement and other fathers of the church, remains dark and misty. We have no concept without a word, and philology has shown us how every word, even the most concrete, is based on a concept. We cannot think of "tree" without the word or a hieroglyphic of some kind. We can even say that, as far as we are concerned, there is no tree, except in language, for in the nature of things there are only oaks or beeches, but not and never a tree. And what is true of tree ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and all sound hygiene, was aiming to make of this terrestrial ball one illimitable fry turned over and well done,—a fry ever doing and never done, which should simmer and fizzle on eternally down the ages. An abstract fry—let me here record it—suits me passing well; yet I like not the concrete and personal broil. I trip gayly to a feast, prepared to eat, but not, as in the supper of Polonius, to be eaten. I have very little of the martyr-stuff about me. It is well, it is glorious, to read of those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... unconcerned about the fact that they could be plainly seen. Periodically our air service issued aeroplane photographs showing the extraordinary development of these trenches, their elaborate construction, the concrete dug-outs, and solid rows of heavy barbed wire, until it almost came to be recognised that an assault upon them would only be attempted by the maddest of leaders, and the prospect of having to take part in it took one's ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... up-leaping harmonies. The whole has certainly more of concrete beauty than many of the labored ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr. Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and declasse and really knew something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper, silent and diligent ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... take the concrete incident. Before that hypocritical thaw early in February, Jethro called upon Amos Cuthbert—not so surly then as he has since become—and talked about buying his wool when it should be duly cut, and permitted Amos to talk about the position of second selectman, for which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in Canada being appointed for life has acted as a breakwater of adamant and reinforced concrete against all labor or capital legislation that has arisen from the passions of the moment. More than once when labor or capital, holding the whip handle in the Commons, would have forced through hasty legislation as to compensation, as to liability, ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... solid, polished steel, some twenty feet square, set on a spreading base of concrete, and divided perpendicularly down the middle into Titanic halves, these being snugly fitted one to the other by a series of triangular corrugations, a variation of the familiar tongue and groove. Interlacing the ponderous mass, from corner to corner, were huge steel bolts, and the ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching upon this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be 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.... When to this we add that to the conception of the rational critic it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be, ... we may well conclude that the influences of religion on the character ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... remember always that they're there framing and padding the velvet skin. More is done by skilful inference than by parading every abstract fact you know and translating the sum-accumulative of your knowledge into the over-accented concrete. Reticence is a kind of vigour. It can even approach violence. The mentally garrulous kill their own inspiration. Inadequacy loves to lump things and gamble with chance for ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... brought him in contact with the French Revolution, of which he felt the inspiring influence. He was fond of children, and the sight of a poor little French peasant girl seems to have been one of the main causes leading him to become an ardent revolutionist. The Prelude tells in concrete fullness how he walked along the banks of the Loire with his friend, a ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... his wireless office and headed for the water-front. Near the shore-end of the breakwater he came to a halt. He could but dimly see the beginning of the outstretching wall of concrete, but plainly enough he could hear the combers thundering over the ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... the sunshine of old Hasluck's round red face, prospered—for awhile; and one afternoon my father, who had been away from home since breakfast time, calling me into his office where also sat my mother, informed me that the long-talked-of school was become at last a concrete thing. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... will"; but the fact is, that one motive weighs down the other, and causes the balance of the mind to lean to the weightier reason. There is no such thing as an exterior will outside the man's brain, to push one scale down with a finger. Will is abstract, not concrete. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... manoeuvres the miller followed the fortunes of one man; Anne Garland of two. The spectators, who, unlike our party, had no personal interest in the soldiery, saw only troops and battalions in the concrete, straight lines of red, straight lines of blue, white lines formed of innumerable knee-breeches, black lines formed of many gaiters, coming and going in kaleidoscopic change. Who thought of every point in the line as an isolated man, each dwelling all to himself in the hermitage of his own mind? ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... patristic writings and legendary records; and various theories have been put forward, not the least astonishing being the supposition that Simon was an alias for Paul, and that the Simon and Peter in the accounts of the fathers and in the narrative of the legends were simply concrete symbols to represent the two sides of the Pauline ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... admire her taste in pictures, for the eye of this humble 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, and a ponderous nose, was Columbus, Cato, or Cockelorum Tibby, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... tears, and it was some time before I caught what she feared. For she was more concrete than I. And she knew now what she was afraid of. It was ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... home to her, like a death, "this is him!" she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible other, when she knows the fearful other flesh, ah, dark- ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the other, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... benevolent jargon talked by many welfare workers, her array of facts would have fallen on more or less indifferent ears. But she offered not vital statistics, but vital documents. She talked in personalities—in personalities so full of meaning that, concrete as they were, they took on general significance—they had the effect of symbols. She furnished watchwords for her listeners, and she did it unconsciously. She would have been indignant if she had been told how large a part her education in ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... often seen to signify the things most high. A parable, paraballo, is that which "throws before" us such concrete imagery as best serves to foreshadow and to fit the mind to understand a certain abstract principle. As we become disciples, "learners" of the Truth, we find it speaks to us only through such emblems as enable us to reason ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... one possible reason for Lucille Sloane's hiring Hastings: she was afraid somebody in the house, Webster, of course, would be arrested. Being in love with him, she never would have suspected him unless there had been concrete, undeniable evidence of his guilt. Do you ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... coast, a few miles above Santa Barbara, there are, I have been told, immense quantities of pure bitumen or mineral tar, which, rising in the ocean, has been thrown upon the shore by the waves, where in a concrete state, like resin, it has accumulated in inexhaustible masses. There are, doubtless, many valuable minerals in the neighbouring mountains, which, when developed by enterprise, will add greatly to the wealth and importance of the ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... nation is often referred to as revealing the civilization of the period. Surely the scientific literature which deals with concrete facts is an exact indicator of the technical knowledge of a period! That little was known of natural gas and doubtless of artificial gas in the seventeenth century is shown by a brief report entitled "A Well and Earth in Lancashire ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... grit in a concrete base— That's Pep! Friendly smile on an honest face— That's Pep! The spirit that helps when another's down, That knows how to scatter the blackest frown, That loves its neighbor, and ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Hansom 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 the experience ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she's a remarkably ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... be but little question about the order of the other forms. Description, still dealing with the concrete, offers an admirable opportunity for shaping and forming the spontaneous expression gained in narration. Following description, in order of ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... found when the tide is at its lowest ebb, so often when the wall of impossibility seems an insuperable mass of concrete, it is found to be the merest paper. As the Intelligence officer, awed by the great solitude of the sleeping veldt, stood musing on its fringe, a voice ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... From the teachings of Prof. Gates, we deduce; that in brain building, that primary step in education, psychologic functioning creates organic structure, and that organic structure is a manifestation in the concrete, of the activities of the mind. In other words, that planted, watered and nourished, by the emotions of the individual, the thoughts, ideas, concepts and images which arise, create a corresponding growth of cell structure in the brain. That these brain cells become the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... overhear the teacher inquiring of the 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 with concrete problems so long that an ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... about them, a pursuit of prettiness which is no doubt the source of their singular attraction, and which invests them with an irresistible charm. The San Giovannino, also in the Vanchettoni, is a more concrete version of childhood, but is by the same hand as its fellow. These four busts fail to characterise the child's head; not indeed that characterisation was needed to make an enchanting work, but that ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Actually, the only concrete evidence of geographic variation that I can detect in these animals is a slight increase southwardly in the frequency and degree of melanism, a kind of variation that is unworthy of taxonomic recognition in this species. It seems best, then, ...
— The Subspecies of the Mexican Red-bellied Squirrel, Sciurus aureogaster • Keith R. Kelson
... good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... teeth were white as a hound's. His black hair was cut short and at the temples was turning gray, although he had not yet reached thirty. It was an eager face, a strong face. It hardened to granite over life in the abstract and softened to the feminine before concrete ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... showed her with a distinctness that was fanciful and lurid the moving faces of hundreds of strangers, the dull roar of voices, and the heat that flowed from the human bodies, seemed to mingle, to become concrete, to lie upon her spirit like a weight. Artois stood by her, leaning on his stick and watching the crowd with his steady eyes. The Marchesino was looking up at Vere, standing in a position that seemed to indicate ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... in 1889, during the underpinning, preparatory to restoration, of the present west front.[1] Beneath this front, but only for a little way within it, the older foundations extended. They were of hard concrete, from 4 to 5 feet deep and wide, and still carried fragments of the walls, about 2 feet 4 inches wide, of tufa, sarsen, and Roman brick. These remains, on examination, proved to have belonged to the east end of a building, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... a single man, but a type; the concrete illustration of a vague ideal he had long known. He realized as the others did not, that the speaker was merely practising on them—training, as the man himself would have said. When Landers was critically conscious, he was not deceived; yet, with ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... could be expected from a Congress which represented the commercial and landholding classes? No prodding was needed to cause it to give the fullest protection to possessions in commerce, land and negro slaves; these were concrete property. But thought was not capitalized; it was not a manufactured product like iron or soap. Nothing can express the pitying contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... impression of being clumsy and stupid. In describing harshness we use words that are harsh, in describing awkwardness we use words that are awkward, in describing brightness and lightness we use words that are bright and light, in the very words themselves giving a concrete illustration ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... of the Water-god or his enemy became assimilated with those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent, the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the life-destroying powers of water, and composite ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... is five miles inland from Clayton-on-Sea, that new and popular resort hardened with asphalt and concrete, to which city folk retire for a change in the summer. During the winter months many of the shops of the big town are closed till summer brings the holiday-makers again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fill with street litter, old paper, and straws. The easterly winds cut the life ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... supply the rapidly increasing acreage of cultivated lands, Willard Holmes came to appreciate the desert-bred surveyor's view of the danger and insistently urged his employers to supply him with funds to replace the temporary wooden structures with safe and lasting works of concrete ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... the mailbox!" Whedbee walked across the street to the square green box with the rounded metal top. Another of the globes had been attached to the mailbox, and the legs had been burned loose from the concrete sidewalk. Confidently, Whedbee lifted the light object, carried it to the ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... breach in the concrete and the besiegers charged through, carrying back the defenders who sought vainly to plug the gap. Soon there would be rioting in the streets again, ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... before the war, called the Wachfels, was about 6,000 tons, single screw, with a speed of about ten knots at the outside. She had been thoroughly adapted for her work as a raider, had four torpedo tubes and six guns (said to be 4.7), with concrete emplacements, not to mention machine and smaller guns—to be used against the prisoners if they should attempt escape, etc.—none of which could be seen by a passing ship, to which the Wolf looked, as she was ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... "afflatus" was upon him. So far as we may judge from his description, he seems to have realised his story first as a complex psychological situation, not as a series of disconnected pictures. He thought in abstractions not in visual images, and he had next to make his abstractions concrete by inventing figures whose actions should be the result of the mental and moral conflict he had conceived. Godwin's attitude to his art forms a striking contrast to that of Mrs. Radcliffe. She has her set of marionettes, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... never 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
... curve it in. It solidifies and unifies the landscape of the whole town and puts all the community centers where they belong. The Town and Settlement straggled a bit before, but the chapel and the school will unite them! Braid says the schoolhouse can be built of weathered stone and concrete and finished by September fifth, in time to start school. Wilkerson can begin immediately putting out his hedges and the Reverend Gregory is down there now finishing laying out the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... most abstract, the most remote from humanity; they influence all others, without being influenced by them. The phenomena considered by the last are, on the contrary, the most complicated, the most concrete, the most directly interesting to man; they depend more or less on all the preceding phenomena, without exercising on them any influence. Between these two extremes, the degrees of speciality, of complication and personality, of phenomena, gradually increase, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... impetuous taunts fail to press to the root of the matter. Diderot excels in opening a subject; he places it in a new light; he furnishes telling concrete illustrations; he thoroughly disturbs and unsettles the medium of conventional association in which it has become fixed. But he does not leave the question readjusted. His mind was not of that quality which is slow to complain where it cannot explain; which does not quit a discussion ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... mankind. It gives us new conceptions of nature and of the possibilities of art; it promotes right ways of work and of study; it teaches the inventor and the discoverer how most surely and promptly to gain their several ends, it gives the world the results of all acquired knowledge in concrete form. This one instance which we are now especially interested in contemplating has performed more wonderful miracles than ever Aladdin's genii attempted. One man, with a steam engine at his hand, turns the wheels of a great mill, drives forty thousand spindles, applies ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... capacity for commanding and taking the initiative, for its End is "what one should do or not do:" but Judiciousness is only apt to decide upon suggestions (though we do in Greek put "well" on to the faculty and its concrete noun, these really mean exactly the same as the plain words), and Judiciousness is neither the having Practical Wisdom, nor attaining it: but just as learning is termed [Greek: sunievai] when a man uses his knowledge, so judiciousness ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... efficient discipline in inductive reasoning. Typical examples have been used to introduce many topics, and it has been the author's aim to give due proportion to both the wide generalizations of our science and to the concrete ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the source to be a passing bug,—a giant bug,—related distantly to our malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate volatility ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... told you, I seem to hear you laugh. "We thought," I would seem to hear you say, "that he was going to tell us of concrete places, of concrete byways, where this so gorgeous romance yet tarries." And you are aggrieved and disappointed. But I bid you patience. I am still too young to be sentimental: so have you no fear. And yet, bereft of all ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright |
