"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the concrete—that is to say, upon the butchers, bakers, and other honest tradesmen of Falmouth—Mrs. Stimcoe waged a predatory war, and waged it without quarter. She had a genius for opening accounts, and something more than genius for keeping her creditors at bay. She never ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... it, though gunners tell me they do, which is natural. One feels one is taking part in a game of skill at a dignified distance, and any feeling of hostility is very impersonal and detached, even when concrete signs of an enemy's ill-will are paying us noisy visits. The fact is—and I fancy this applies to all sorts and conditions of private soldiers—in our life in the field, fighting plays a relatively small part. I doubt if people at ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... town have them," Arethusa came quickly to the defence of her county, "but it's nobody I really know. Timothy was going to get one, but his silo blew down and he couldn't this summer; because he put up a concrete one in its place and ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... journal. Yet the seeds sown within him during the previous winter were sprouting. An irresistible impulse urged him to continue the work of Buckle. History and philosophy were the ultimate ends tempting his mind, but first of all he was impelled to express himself in terms of concrete life, and the way had been shown him by Goethe. Moved by Goethe's example, he felt himself obliged to break through the stifling forms of classical drama. "No verse, no eloquence, no unity of place," was the resolution ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... happiness. And Jefferson did not flinch, as did many of his associates, from giving that right a full and general application to blacks as well as whites. Nor was he a mere doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He described what he had seen. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... slender to the verge of nonentity. Science was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from its surroundings is an abstraction. A personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social. Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her characters. She paints nature less in its own beauty than in its ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... acres, with all sorts of buildings and ruins. One of the old barracks, three hundred feet long, was in good preservation in 1906, being utilized by the owner, Joseph Wilde, for a store, post office, hotel, and residence. The guard house with its grim iron door and twenty-inch concrete walls is also fairly well preserved. One frame building of two stories, we were told, was transported by ox team from Kansas City at a cost of one hundred dollars a ton. The old place is crumbling away, slowly disappearing with the ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... idea of the skating ballet was due to Meyerbeer. At the time there was an amusing fellow in Paris who had invented roller skates and who used to practise his favorite sport on fine evenings on the large concrete surfaces of the Place de la Concorde. Meyerbeer saw him and got the idea of the famous ballet. In the early days of the opera it certainly was charming to see the skaters come on accompanied by a pretty chorus and a rhythm from the violins regulated by that ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... Sound and concrete teaching like this is always necessary, but is hardly likely to be popular. The doctrine of disobedience is everywhere preached in a democracy; violation of contracts is a normal practice and law-breakers have been known to be publicly feasted by the very members ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... it were. But when we arrived at King Olomba's town yesterday morning, and found neither slaves nor barracoon there, I must confess that I was visited by some such suspicion as that of which Captain Perry has just been speaking, although in my case it did not take quite such a concrete and connected form. To my mind there is only one thing against your theory, sir," he continued, turning to the skipper, "and that is the existence of the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... to the needs of life and its emotional appeal is the first condition of artistic creation. By new combinations of material elements to bring emotion to expression in concrete harmonious forms, themselves charged with emotion and communicating it, is to fashion a work of art. To feel in material, whether in the forms of nature or in works of art, a meaning for the spirit ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... have not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to affect me. She was quite unable to tell me what she had seen, but her whole manner expressed a dazed horror, not so much of some concrete fear as of the ghastly position in which she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a brave face, no doubt, and present in its native humility my scant but quite ponderable germ. The seed sprouted in that vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which calls itself, for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of the minor "social phenomena" with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest of the trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no doubt, a fine purple peach, but it might pass for ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... developing and following on one another's heels in Diana's mind. But in my head there was nothing concrete enough to call a "thought." Feelings seemed to have raced upstairs from heart to brain, and driven ideas out of the house. They ran wildly round and round, saying to each other, "What if I never see him again? What if he should be killed?" But ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to save or defend Norfolk, nor how to destroy it. No name to be found for such concrete incapacity. The rebels are masters, taking our leaders by the nose. Norfolk gives to them thousands of guns, &c., and nobody cries for shame. They ought to go in sackcloth, those narrow-sighted, blind rulers. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... a great fondness for mechanics, and one at least of his inventions, the "Pierpont or Doric Stove," was a bit of concrete philosophy,—a miniature temple glowing with perpetual fire,—a cast-iron syllogism of itself, so classically just in its proportions, and so eminently characteristic, as to be a type of the author. He had been led ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... time to time raiding one another's lines. I examined the deep, well-ordered Boche trenches. All dug-outs and practically everything of military value they had destroyed prior to their departure, but a few concrete and steel emplacements and snipers' posts still remained—beautifully made and all in commanding positions. The destruction of the villages, farms and lands by the Germans on their retirement was absolutely ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... capacity, and which you consequently despised as trash or resented as insult, did you not, as you were gleefully vanishing, hear a soft sigh breathed out upon the air,—"Dear child, he is seeing his happiest days"? In the concrete, it was Mrs. Smith or Dr. Jones speaking of you. But going back to general principles, it was Commonplacedom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... plan so that in the course marked out the chief idea cannot be missed, without frightening off any one of the great herd by peculiar, unusual or doubtful terms, theories or visions of the future. And then organize, practically, systematically, always aiming directly at the concrete reality without troubling yourself in the least about abstractions. And see that your herd is fed and sheltered and stabled as quickly as possible, and that it find gratification of its instincts in the course once marked out. And on the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... cadets wearing the green uniforms of first-year Earthworms and the blue of the upper-classmen stopped all activity as they heard the blasting of the braking rockets high in the heavens. They stared enviously into the sky, watching the smooth steel-hulled spaceship drop toward the concrete ramp area of the spaceport, three ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... and 9.4's, Taking to camping out of doors; Out of the shelter of steel-built sheds, Sleeping out in their concrete beds— The proud guns, The loud guns, Whose echo wakes the hills, And shakes the tiles and scatters glass ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... than Homer, David than Sophocles; and no Hebrew prophet ever said, "Offer a cock to Esculapius." So is Christianity far beyond Buddhism; and far beyond Sakya Muni, dim and obscure as he is, are the concrete realities of the life of Jesus. Whether anything further is to come, I tremble to ask; and yet I do ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... petty life devoted to gaining a few paltry dollars!" But he did not say this, or even register the emotion that would justly accompany such a subtitle. He merely rejoined, "All right, sir, I'm not going to touch them," and went quickly out. "Darned old grouch!" he muttered as he went down the concrete walk to the ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... constitutes art of leadership. The art of leadership consists of applying sound tactical principles to concrete cases on ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... drug and technological area of medicine, concrete benefits have already resulted from the national space program. These include, as already mentioned, a drug developed from a missile propellant to treat mental ills, a means of rapidly lowering blood temperature in operations, and a small efficient valve ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... Our new area we found was full of preparation for something; what the exact nature of this something might be we did not know. Several large railways and dumps were being built, new roads made, and here and there with great secrecy big concrete gun platforms were laid. Each day we sent large numbers to work, mostly on the railways, and once more we heard the words "Big Push." We were always living on the verge of the Big Push, and many times in 1915 had thought that it had started—at ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is the Bible on which he placed his. It is right that the memory 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 our ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... old boards and we had to work our way kind of in and out through the old rotten trestle of the scenic railway. That thing crossed our path like a big, long, wriggling snake. Some of the old booths were boarded up and some of them were all falling to pieces. The concrete basin that used to be a swimming pool was all full of rubbish. And the little platform away way up, that the man used to do the dive of death from, was all falling to pieces. Some places we had to climb over the old ramshackle booths, ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... it can be a very fast and complicated game. You could see jai alai played in specially built concrete courts in many cities in Spain, also in the state of Florida, right here in our own country. A jai alai court is called a "fronton." But in the Basque country you'd see all the men and boys in the village playing jai alai back of the church, using the high stone wall ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... of character considered in this chapter, being conditioned by certain common aspirations and identical changes of environment, finally became concrete in a small number of fairly homogeneous mentalities. Speaking only of the more characteristic, we may refer them to four types: the Jacobin, mystic, revolutionary, ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... mythological tendency(647) which had created the religion and expressed itself in the poetry of the Greeks, and possibly contributed to foster Shelley's sympathies with heathen religion. His mind was peculiarly Greek, simple not complex, imaginative rather than fanciful, abstract not concrete, intellectual not emotional; wanting the many-sidedness of modern taste, partaking of the unity of science rather than the multiformity of nature, like sculpture rather than painting. This mental ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... "It is the highest form in which the native activity of childhood expresses itself," says Miss Blow. Fairy tales offer to the little child an opportunity for the exercise of that self-active inner impulse which seeks expression in two kinds of play, the symbolic activity of free play and the concrete presentation of types. The play, The Light Bird, and the tale, The Bremen Town Musicians, both offer an opportunity for the child to express that pursuit of a light afar off, a theme which appeals to childhood. The fairy tale, because it presents an organized ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just a little ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... him a little impatiently. He had forgotten the concrete, for the moment, in the abstract, and was donning his armor for a battle with Kenny upon the "fundamentals." Hence he was not too well pleased with Yankee's interruption. But Donald Ross gladly welcomed the diversion. The subject was ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... himself on our side, but if we could have made up our minds then to instal a Majorescu or a Marghiloman Ministry in office, we could have had the Roumanian army with us. In connection with this were several concrete proposals. In order to carry out the plan we should have been compelled to make territorial concessions in Hungary to a Majorescu Ministry—Majorescu demanded it as a primary condition to his undertaking the conduct of affairs, and this proposal ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... 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 ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... of revolution bears two forms. They may be discrete or concrete, but they are two—ideas, movement,—cause, result—force, effect. And progressive humanity marches upon its future with ideas for its centre, movement its right and left wings. Not a step is taken till the Great Field-Marshal has sent his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... observation of cases, combined with self-scrutiny and self-analysis and self-knowledge (which means a keen insight into human nature and the human mind in its manifold workings). Here is a serious, concrete problem of great practical importance. Its solution and elucidation means much. And he who comes forward with an explanation of this problem should be expected to give conclusive proof of his conception and for his conclusion. And we should, justly and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... beckoning us to new and nobler visions. That "thread of the all-sustaining beauty, which runs through all and doth all unite" gently leads us from the things which are tangible and temporal to the truths which are spiritual and eternal; from the beauty of the concrete to the beauty of the abstract, onward along the road of beauty and farther up the heights of truth until our admiration for the beauty of the sunrise, the snow crystal, the graceful spray of the trees in winter, the exquisite order and harmony ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... should confine himself to the concrete examinations of the paper, ink, seals, etc., and leave to the counsel the task of reasoning on the purport of the words added, and all other matters not allied to the materials left as the result of the forgery, yet it would ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... intended to 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
... something new to say, it was inevitable that they should seek to invent a new manner of utterance. Renan was doubtless right in thinking that they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects; but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against them in the matter of ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... Theophilus Opperdyke. That solemn Senior, who had not seen the slightest effect his "Missionary Work" was having on the stolid Thor, was in despair; but he did not know the truth. As Hicks had once said, "You don't know nothing what goes on in Thor's dome. There's a wall of solid concrete around the machinery of his mind, and you can't see the wheels, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Regeneration had taken up the same matter and had displayed it in a somewhat different light. Abner had got hold of the idea of limited partnership and had sought to apply it, in roundabout fashion, to the matrimonial relation. His treatment, far from suggesting an academic aloofness, was as concrete as characterization and conversation could make it; no one would have supposed, at first glance, that what chiefly moved him was a chaste abstract Platonic regard for the whole gentler sex. In short, people—such seemed to be his thesis—might very advantageously separate, and most informally ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... with appellative nouns, sometimes to denote emphatically the species, but generally to designate individuals. 2. Nouns stand in discourse for persons, things, or abstract qualities. 3. Adjectives commonly express the concrete qualities of persons or things; but sometimes, their situation or number. 4. Pronouns are substitutes for names, or nouns; but they sometimes represent sentences. 5. Verbs assert, ask, or say something; and, for the most part, express action or ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... without the least ambiguity, what a spectator of these marvellous occurrences would have witnessed. I doubt not that his poem is familiar to all of you, but I should like to recall one passage to your minds, in order that I may be justified in what I have said regarding the perfectly concrete, definite, picture of the origin of the animal world ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Boyd, the fever in his veins mounted daily as he saw his dream assuming concrete form. The many problems arising as the work advanced afforded him unceasing activity; the unforeseen obstacles which were encountered hourly required swift and certain judgment, taxing his ingenuity to the utmost. He became so filled ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... resources: large concrete or natural rock water catchments collect rainwater (no longer used for drinking water) and adequate ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... discovered through Jesse Brown, whose confidence he had gained, that there were agitators in the camp, undoubtedly receiving their inspiration and pay from sources inimical to all capital in the abstract and to all order and decency at Black Rock in the concrete, who were fomenting the unrest and dissatisfaction among the men. In order to investigate the difficulties personally Peter went down to the camp and lived there for a time, bunking with the men and listening ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... a grotesque touch to it. The spectacle inclined one to laugh, almost making one forget for a moment that here in this spectacle one beheld the misery of war made concrete; that in the lorn state of these poor folks its effects were focused and made vivid; that, while in some way it touched every living creature on the globe, ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... acquiring particular ideas, and putting those particular ideas together. You cannot make bricks without straw. Do not worry about literature in the abstract, about theories as to literature. Get at it. Get hold of literature in the concrete as a dog gets hold of a bone. If you ask me where you ought to begin, I shall gaze at you as I might gaze at the faithful animal if he inquired which end of the bone he ought to attack. It doesn't matter in the slightest degree where you begin. Begin ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... 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
... and other corrections of the calendar are now generally well understood, and have been so often stated in detail in print, it is thought sufficient to note here their concrete results as affecting dates occurring ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... religious system, the introduction of certain great principles, the elevation of religious ideas, the delivery of Divine truths, the exhibition of a life and example, but as the call and creation of a definite, concrete, organised society of men. The subject, of investigation is not merely the character and history of the Person, but the Person as connected with His work. Christ is regarded not simply in Himself or in His teaching, as the Founder of a philosophy, a morality, a theology in the abstract, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the Government to create opinion on concrete questions only applies so long as a firm public opinion has not already set in. As soon as the process of "crystallization," as it is called, is complete, there is nothing left for the Government but to follow the preponderating public opinion. ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... premature explosions—and in addition all the dangers of railroading. So it was that one night, as Jurgis was on his way out with his gang, an engine and a loaded car dashed round one of the innumerable right-angle branches and struck him upon the shoulder, hurling him against the concrete ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... similar to Aztatlan, which would mean "the place of herons," some spot where these birds would love to congregate, from aztatl, the heron, and in after ages, this latter, as the plainer and more concrete signification, came to prevail, and was adopted ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... of this paper may be explained by a concrete example. When a barefoot boy steps on a sharp stone there is an immediate discharge of nervous energy in his effort to escape from the wounding stone. This is not a voluntary act. It is not due to his own personal experience— his ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... dubious constructions above the operations of pure thought and pure insight is indeed a return to the philosophy of the man in the street. 'Social morality, art, philosophy, and religion take us far beyond the spatio-temporal externality of history; these are concrete and necessary living worlds, and in them the finite mind begins to experience something of what individuality must ultimately mean.' Our inquiry has thus led us to the threshold of one of the fundamental problems of philosophy—the value and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... distinguished on the one hand from deities that are simply personalizations of physical objects (such as Vesta and Agni) and on the other hand from poetical personifications, such as that of Wisdom in the Jewish books of Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon, and from concrete figures like the Logos of Philo and the Fourth Gospel. Though these abstract forms appear to be relatively late (posterior to the formation of the greater gods), the meagerness of our data makes it difficult ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... is quite delightful to look at. The intellectual juvenile who awakens the tremendous wrath of a Norma of private life by considering woman an inferior animal, is lecturing at the present moment, we understand, on the Concrete in connexion with the Will. The legs of the young philosopher who considers Shakespeare an over-rated man, were seen by us dangling over the side of an omnibus last Tuesday. We have no acquaintance with the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... not 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 this knowledge, at times he forgot and moved along ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... delicate velvet of the moss, the dark shades of seaweed of figurations as dainty as those of ferns, and the different sorts of shells, big and little, all lying as solid as if they had been set in concrete, the appearance of the ship submitted was something incredibly fantastic and admirable. Whether the hatches were on or not I could not tell, so thickly coated were the decks; but whether or not, the deposits and marine growths rendered the surface as impenetrable as ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... a 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 ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... blast, and he seemed to run no risks by letting the spies report to any one but himself. Fred, who slept more lightly than I did, told me afterward that the women principally brought him particulars of the workings of local politics; the men detailed news of the oncoming concrete enemy. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago,' said our host as we trotted over miles of it. 'We found it the only way to fight the prairie mud. Look!' Where the daring road ended, there lay unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... was not dependent on the Roman armies or Greek learning, but that it was bound up in the career and teaching of a Baby that night born in a stable in an obscure village in Judea. As we imagine such a case we see in the concrete the meaning of the revolution set in motion by this single event; and we are led to adore the ways of God in that He has chosen for the final approach to man for the purpose of redemption, this way of simplicity and humbleness. Man would ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... recreate it, impregnated with his own soul; the secret motive powers were the mystic love of eternity and the love of woman which had outgrown this world and aspired to the next. To Goethe, thirsting to give a concrete shape to his yearning, God and eternity were too intangible, too remote and incomprehensible—but the woman he loved with religio-erotic intensity was familiar to him. The Eternal-Feminine is thus not fraught with incomprehensibility, but is rather, and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... typical manifestation of the Law of Sacrifice. We can only understand it as applied to the Christ, when we see it as a special manifestation of the universal law, a reflection below of the Pattern above, showing us in a concrete human life ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... always good-natured; civil; glad to be amused; open-armed to any one who amused it; patient with every one who did not insist on putting himself in its way, or costing it money; but this was not consideration, still less power in any of its concrete forms, and applied as well or better to a comic actor. Certainly a rare soprano or tenor voice earned infinitely more applause as it gave infinitely more pleasure, even in America; but one does what one can with one's means, and casting up one's balance sheet, one ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... his writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as a human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency, might best be studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the concrete—of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencillings on ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... LUNDIE.—A practical paper on the above subject.—The uses and proper methods of handling concrete, machine mixing contrasted with hand ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... and consistence of cheese. The larger quantity was intended for exportation; but she also, taking some strips of cotton, dipped them into the mass, and produced some apologies for candles. The flame was not bright; but the vegetable tallow has the advantage of remaining concrete, or hard, under the greatest tropical heat, white that produced from animal fat becomes too soft for the purpose. When she had no household work to give me, I was sent out with a number of other slaves, both black and brown, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... rheumatism, consists in the too great action of the absorbent vessels of those parts; yet the remote cause in these cases is probably owing to the inflammation of the membranes; which at that time are believed to secrete a material more liable to coagulate or concrete, than they would otherwise produce by increased action alone without the production of new vessels, which constitutes inflammation. As defined ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... strips of soft body-stuff soaked with lime and hardened, like bricklayer's mortar, or concrete.[24] When you know the shape of the body, you know the bones; for they simply form a shell over the head and run like cores, or piths, down the centre of the back, and down each joint ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... Platonic fashion of referring to the obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, but an ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... least ambiguity, what a spectator of these marvellous occurrences would have witnessed. I doubt not that his poem is familiar to all of you, but I should like to recall one passage to your minds, in order that I may be justified in what I have said regarding the perfectly concrete, definite picture of the origin of the animal world ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... 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. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... over the rock on bare feet to thank him," the girl replied, her big eyes shining. And with the words there entered into Jerry-Jo's distorted imagination a concrete and lasting jealousy of poor Dick Travers, who was innocent of any actual memory of Priscilla Glenn. Travers at that time was studying as few college men do, always with the spur of lost years and a big ambition lashing ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... with children cannot possibly appreciate the enjoyment and benefit that can accrue from them. It is not only the physical good that results, nor the inspiration which one may draw from nature, but the concrete advantages that come from the fellowship with the children are a new and a real experience—this is what counts. You will have opportunities of sewing seeds in their minds that will grow into a harvest that ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... 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 ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... It has been observed those are the most robust whose serum resembles most the white of an egg. It has therefore been most rationally concluded, that the origin of the animal spirits is from aliments capable of being changed into a similar substance, but so attenuated by incalation as to concrete by fire. For this reason the greatest support of the spirits is afforded by light and nourishing meats and drinks, which in taste and smell are even agreeable to infants. All cordials and aromatics are consequently the most proper for such purposes, and at such times, when ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... started for Sonora. In seven miles I came to the Stanislaus River, running in a deep and splendid canon. The river here is spanned by a fine concrete bridge, built jointly by Tuolumne and Calaveras Counties, between which the river forms the dividing line. In the bottom of the canon is the Melones mine, with a mill operating one hundred stamps. The main tunnel is a mile and a half in length; the longest mining tunnel in ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... great army and be ready, at the slightest provocation, to attack any foreign Power. In fact, however, the sending of the Great Fleet, which was wholly his project, was designed by him to strengthen the prospect of peace for the United States. Through it, he gave a concrete illustration of his maxim: "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." The Panama Canal was then half dug and would be finished in a few years. Distant nations thought of this country as of a land peopled by dollar-chasers, too absorbed in getting rich to think of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... woman loves concrete applications. She is your only true pragmatist. If a philosophy will not work, says she, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... completed for use. Several large iron-roofed sheds stood by the water's edge. Gangs of Arabs were at work; strings of donkeys carrying mud raised the dust in heavy clouds; carpenters in blue trousers hammered and sawed; planks, bricks, barrels of concrete, and piles of matting littered the ground: and upon all the vertical rays of the sun beat down unmercifully. The creek was full of the mahallas that had brought up our equipment, and for the rest of that ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... to vault a cathedral in stone, with no more money than was necessary, and to have a clearstory to it, that you could not do it cheaper, and perhaps not better, than the Gothic architects did it; but to vault such a building in stone when you could do it much cheaper and better with iron ribs and concrete is, in my opinion, dilettante art. Groins are not beautiful things, but, on the contrary, are ugly, and we should wish to obviate their ugliness if we could; but when they were merely unavoidable methods ...
— The Brochure Series Of Architectural Illustration, Vol 1, No. 2. February 1895. - Byzantine-Romanesque Doorways in Southern Italy • Various
... making it great enough to match the wide fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the thing seemed done—vague and yet, somehow, concrete. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... presently that Utirupa had declined to recognize Blaine's contract with his predecessor. Samson's guarded hints, and the fact that the mouth of the mine remained blocked with concrete masonry were more or less corroborative. But the Blaines did not go, although Dick put in ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... scientists who have felt this need, and who have taken pains to fulfil it, the late Professor A. Eddington obtains an eminent position. Among his relevant utterances we will quote here the following, because it contains a concrete statement concerning the field of external observation which forms the basis for the modern scientific world-picture. In his Philosophy of Physical Science we find him stating that 'ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have been reached by visual sensation ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... 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
... you see this chances are excellent that I shall be dead. However, that is of little importance. I have found the proof we need—their distribution plant. It's an old warehouse. I am going there to see if I cannot obtain concrete proof—perhaps a pocketful of tokens. If I fail, you must carry on. Farewell, professor. It was a privilege ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... Twice a day they repeated this mournful exercise, and even at other times were never seen in public but with cap on head and discipline in hand. Few Englishmen joined the Flagellants, but their appearance is not unworthy of notice as the first concrete evidence of the religious unrest which soon became more widespread. Before long the Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe, was studying arts at the little north-country foundation of the Balliols at Oxford, and John ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... together, then fuse them in a metal pot over a close fire, taking care to continue the heat until all spume has disappeared from the surface, when the liquid appears clear, the composition is ready to be poured out to cool and concrete; afterward being ground to a fine powder. To use this composition, the steel to be welded is raised to a heat, which may be expressed by bright yellow, it is then dipped among the welding powder, and again placed in the fire until it attains ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... often been pointed out, not only in old age, but at every period of his life, there was a mystic strain in him which was only kept in check by what was the strongest instinct of his nature—the instinct that demanded the direct vision of the concrete fact as the only condition on which he could build "the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... assumed the offensive, and driven the Germans back to the Aisne. Ypres, Hazebrouck, Estairs and Armentieres had been retaken on the Western frontier of Belgium and France. The huge Austrian siege guns, 42 centimetres, had proven too much for the antique concrete of the Belgian and French forts, but the tide of ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... in no mood to discuss a concrete type. To so intelligent a girl, a hint should be enough. He drew the telegraph-form that still lay on the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... on the earth, to which he was fastened by some indissoluble laws of nature which he could not grasp, would be a welcome relief. He felt that with a heavy pick in his hand he could strike savagely at the concrete rock, the ribs of the earth, and almost enjoy himself. He felt that it would be like an attack, although a futile and antlike one, at creation itself. All this he thought idly, walking, even hurrying, along the slippery pavement through the pale, sleety mist. He ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... woman's club for the improvement of the living conditions in their homes and communities. Mr. Washington and his teachers went right on to the farms and into the homes, and into the churches and the schools, and everywhere showed, for the most part by concrete object-lessons, how they could make their farms more productive, their homes more comfortable, their schools more useful, and their church services more inspiring. All this was done not with an idea of starting an extension department ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... that they do not find. But if we open our hearts for Him, that is simultaneous with the coming of Him to us. 'Ye have not, because ye ask not.' Do not forget, dear friends, that desire, if it is genuine, will take a very concrete form and will be prayer. And it is prayer—by which I do not mean the utterance of words without desire, any more than I mean desire without the direct casting of it into the form of supplication—it is prayer that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... in her work, slop-basin in hand. The concrete details were beginning to take hold ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... brief outline of articles and books he had read; then complimented the great company by declaring that he realized the knowledge he had acquired was theoretical and abstract, and that he wished to gain practical, concrete ideas by studying the methods of the corporation. He enclosed with his letter ten cents in postage stamps, and requested that he be sent any forms, instruction sheets, sales bulletins, etc., the president was willing to let him ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... 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
... delegation we were advised to put principle aside and to place the question on a more practical plane. Then the German delegation would be disposed to concessions.... It was unthinkable that the Germans should decide to continue the war over, say, the Moon Islands, if you put this demand in concrete form. ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... What are some concrete suggestions, developed from the experience of case workers, as to how to proceed in searching for deserting men? A full and careful talk with the wife is the first requisite, supplemented by equally thorough interviews with ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... my own impression," Chung said. Blades jerked his undisciplined imagination back from the idea of a Thing, with bug eyes and tentacles, cast in reinforced concrete, and listened ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... this time on the story of her life is the 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 of young hearts to some exalted ideal, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the window up all the while, cursing softly and horribly at each damnatory creak. Yes—there it was—and people thought fire-escapes ugly. Personally, Oliver had seldom seen anything in his life which combined concrete utility with abstract beauty so ideally as that little flight of iron steps leading down the entry outside the ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... perpendicularly from above them. One single well-aimed shot had usually sufficed to cripple the complicated mechanism and once that was injured, it was impossible to bring the gun back into position for firing. The concrete roofs of the ammunition rooms and barracks were shot to pieces and the traverses were reduced to rubbish heaps by the bursting of the numerous shells of the enemy. And all that was finally left round the tattered Stars and ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... they are not true," he said first. "I should welcome any hint of absence of mind in myself as a sign that the abstract could exclude the concrete, which is unfortunately not the case with me." Then, in a moment, he said, "People have no business to tell such stories. I should not mind their not being true, if ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inspired human experiences. It is to an extraordinary degree human, dealing all along with names as familiar to us as any in any history can be; with characters which are perfectly individual; with lives lived in the face of difficulty, danger, trial, sorrow, as concrete as possible; with deaths met and overcome under conditions of mystery, suspense, trial to courage and to trust, which for all time the heart of man can apprehend in their solemnity. Meanwhile, as a matter of diction and eloquence, the ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule |
