"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attorney in the discharge of the functions assigned to him by the law, is the reconciliation of his duty to his client, with his duty to the court. To mark out this line in advance is easier than to determine each special duty in a concrete way, yet neither is free from difficulty and each requires a calm and clear understanding of the function of counsel as an instrument in the machinery of justice. This is the main object of legal ethics. It covers ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... 'contes' fails to have a moral motive. The stories are short and naturally slight; some, indeed, incline rather to the essay than to the story, but each has that enthralling interest which justifies its existence. Coppee possesses preeminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction. A sketch, for instance, is the first tale written by him, 'Une Idylle pendant le Seige' (1875). In a novel we require strong characterization, great grasp of character, and the novelist should show us the human heart and intellect in full play ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... enumerated items, his distaste for such a petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing him outside into the mellow end of the day. A figure darkened the doorway; it was Caroline. "I hardly saw him," she declared hotly. "Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his buttonhole." Her hoops flattened as she made her way through the ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Cathedral was found to have been built on an old "water-bed" having a foundation of peat, the distance between the ground level and the firm gravel beneath the peat being 27 feet. The only hope of saving the east end was to remove the peat and fill in the spaces with concrete and cement. With the removal of the peat, however, there was so great an influx of water that pumping was of no avail. Two of the best divers in the kingdom were then procured, and by working on their backs and sides in 15 feet of muddy water they succeeded ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... of the valley grew nearer every day. Again Harry and I lapsed into the excitement of a race against adversity, because unless we were well out on the open prairie before winter bound the sod into the likeness of concrete there could be no hope of even partly recouping our loss. Even Johnston seemed infected with our spirit; but while we generally worked in dogged silence, he had ever a ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the little marble tables at the back. The gaudy, gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect. I wondered why I, a creature from the concrete world, was there. I had an insane impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and wander, wander for ever, away from the world. I was walking along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, when I stumbled against a fellow-promenader and the shock brought me to my senses. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... his coats, boots, and hats for their own use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably, in a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois; and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to wear mine. There is no neck in the world that I want my collar to span except my own. It is very exasperating to me to go to my bookcase and miss a book ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... landed class the House of Lords remained until quite the last few years, when the practice of purchase has admitted to it brewers, money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who can furnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund. A concrete example is often of value in the illustration of a general process, and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the reader as excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolution of the monasteries not only emphasised the position ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... 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, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... row of buttons. There were three rows of such buttons. The concealed lighting that spilled from the huge bowl under the ceiling revealed a sleeping-porch, three sides of which were fine-meshed copper screen. The fourth side was the house wall, solid concrete, through which ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... a milk diet for a considerable time it is customary to put something into the milk to make it more concentrated, for otherwise they would drink and drink and then hardly get fuel enough. To give a concrete illustration—a man's energy requirement for a day may be met by from four to five quarts of milk (unless he is doing very heavy manual labor), but it would be much more practical to substitute a loaf ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... is concrete being, which finite [20] mortals see and comprehend only as abstract glory. As mortal mind, or the material sense of life, is put off, the spiritual sense and Science of being is ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Oh, you mean 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 truck, and ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... he was going, gained courage to say,— 'At slavery in the abstract my whole soul rebels, I am as strongly opposed to 't as any one else.' 1150 'Ay, no doubt, but whenever I've happened to meet With a wrong or a crime, it is always concrete,' Answered Phoebus severely; then turning to us, 'The mistake of such fellows as just made the fuss Is only in taking a great busy nation For a part of their pitiful cotton-plantation.— But there comes Miranda, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... arisen the belief that the Solar System originated, not by manufacture but by evolution. Besides its abstract parentage in those grand general conceptions which Science has generated, this hypothesis has a concrete parentage of the highest character. Based as it is on the law of universal gravitation, it may claim for its remote progenitor the great thinker who established that law. It was first suggested by one who ranks high among philosophers. The man who collected evidence indicating ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... to reach both their minds and hearts. Solid argument, clear method, and indisputable facts are necessary for the first purpose; vivid imagination, concrete illustration, and animated feeling are ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge . . . I would rather consider Shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... its reforming elements. The great source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their earlier stages of education men find it very difficult to grasp anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definite person or group of ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... by his admiration of Moliere. In dealing with historical writings he recognises the importance of the study of governments, institutions, and social life, and at the same time values highly a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a feeling for all that is real, concrete, and living. To his rare gifts of intellect and of the soul was added an inexpressible personal charm, in which something that was almost feminine was united with the reserved power and authority of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... refer to the awful story except in so far as it is a concrete illustration of what I wish to write about—the power of thought examined with common sense in its relation to the happiness of each individual, and the responsibility of its employment by each individual for the benefit of the community—not from the desire to use this ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... good market; the ashes, &c., are used in the furnaces for the drying process, and the residue therefrom, or clinkers, forms a valuable substance for roadmaking or building purposes, &c., in the shape of concrete, paving flags, mantelpieces, tabletops, and even sepulchral monuments being constructed with it, so that in a short time the receipts will, it is expected, more than balance the expenditure in this department of local sanitary work. The pollution of the river Tame in past years ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... discussion of all the considerations, on one side or the other, of this question, would demand more space, and more of technical detail, than the scope of these papers permits. As with most conclusions of a concrete character dealing with contradictory elements, the result reached will inevitably be rather an approximation than an absolute demonstrable certainty; a broad general statement, not a narrow formula. All rules of War, which is not an exact science, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... by these mysterious outsiders, the village people began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ... but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... you will visit them, say in midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture has all been hidden away behind the iron doors of the several cells, you shall find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted, and shall walk up and down their concrete length with some such sense of secure finality as you would experience in pacing the aisle of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... exactly remember, and though it be somewhat Nice to make, yet I am willing to Acquaint You with, because the thing Produc'd, though it be but a Curiosity, is wont not a little to please the Beholders, and it is a way of turning by the help of a Dry Substance, an almost Golden-Colour'd Concrete, into a White one, the Several Tryals are not at present so fresh in my Memory to enable me to tell you Certainly, whether an Equal onely or a Double weight of Common Sublimate must be taken in reference to the Tinglass, but if I mistake not, there was in the Experiment ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... proposed that a party of three men should travel to Cape Crozier from winter quarters during the winter months in order to secure emperor penguins' eggs. The ship was to call at Cape Crozier, land provisions, and erect a small hut of fibro-concrete sheets for the use of this party. The ship was off the Cape on the afternoon of January 9, and a boat put off with Stenhouse, Cope, Joyce, Ninnis, Mauger, and Aitken to search for a landing-place. "We steered in towards the Barrier," wrote Stenhouse, "and found ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... be an armour-clad rooster of this species that, crossed with a Plymouth Rock, was responsible for the reinforced-concrete chicken that we met at dinner the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... understand that these were the means for the conversion of the Gentiles, and that he had quite another gospel for the enlightened portion of the community. They could not see that among heathens used to apotheosis, man-worship, and plastic gods, ideas, to become effective, must put on concrete and tangible bodies. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... wholly attuned to the note of cleverness—of competence, facility, grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is concrete and vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis Quinze epoch, indeed, that one may say that nature itself was artificial—that is to say, all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to paint; at least all they ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... together; in other cases men do not use the knowledge which they have." Aristotle in his Constitutions had made a study of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions of the states of his day, and the fruits of that study are seen in the continual reference to concrete political experience, which makes the Politics in some respects a critical history of the workings of the institutions of the Greek city state. In Books IV., V., and VI. the ideal state seems far away, ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... between gates and angles. Towards the sea was a water gate on a lower level. The material is marble from Trau and Brazza limestone. The sea facade is about 550 ft. long, the north about 530 ft., the east and west some 620 ft. The external walls are double throughout, of worked stone filled in with concrete, the thickness being 6 ft. 6 in., and the height from 60 to 80 ft. On the three land facades are double-arched windows 20 ft. from the ground, 6 ft. 6 in. broad, and a little over 11 ft. high. Only three of the angle towers remain, the fourth having fallen in 1555. The principal gateway ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... admirable as it is, there is not in it any real trace of the abstract conception of social history. Polybius recognises the unity of history, so far as that could be understood in the second century before Christ, but he treats his subject in the concrete, describing the chain of events, but not attempting to seek their law. It was Montesquieu who first applied the comparative method to social institutions; who first considered physical conditions in connection with ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... an idea 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
... truly in it. For at sight of a window which the truck was passing, and without even stopping to call to the driver, Johnnie dropped himself over the end-board to the smooth concrete. The window was no larger than many a one he had glimpsed during the long drive northward. What drew him toward it, as if it were a powerful magnet, was the fact that ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... in charge of Commander Alfred F. B. Carpenter, with two ferryboats, the Daffodil and the Iris, were to escort six obsolete British cruisers filled with concrete and sand to the harbor mouths at Ostend and Zeebrugge and to sink them there in the channels. The ferryboats carried sailors and marines who were to attack and destroy the mole. It was thought that this attack would divert the attention ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... has probably been as much folly uttered by political economy as against it, which is saying something. The danger as regards theories of political economy is the obvious one of their abstract conclusions being applied to concrete things. ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... sign of life about the place. The shades were drawn; it bore a look of desertion. Only pausing for a moment, as even a book-agent might, after many repeated rebuffs, Garrison wended his way across the street, proceeded slowly up the concrete walk, ascended the steps, and ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... of observation—can go beyond experienced fact and the deductions which experience seems to justify us in making from experienced fact. The definition cannot mean much to us until it is interpreted by a concrete example, and I shall turn to such. It must, however, be borne in mind that the word "rationalism" is meant to cover a great variety of opinions, and we have said comparatively little about him when we have called a man a rationalist in philosophy. Men ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... abstract a man admires nobility and intelligence in a woman; but in the concrete he always prefers a bird of Paradise to a wren, a decoration to an inspiration and incense ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... said, beaming about him, "we are gathered here, as you know, to formulate the report of our investigation into vice conditions. You have labored long and faithfully. Now the time has come to put forth the fruit of your labors in a form at once concrete and illuminating." ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... judge that play is about from reading the first act, and what is the author's name? I might have to produce a little concrete information in the fracas," the eminent producer paused to inquire just as ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... his hut—it might better be called den—a curiously built thing, with walls of vertical poles set in a quadrangular trench dug in the ground, and roofed with grass. Inside and out it was plastered with clay, and the floor of dried mud was as smooth and hard as concrete paving. In one end there was a wide fireplace grimy with soot, in the other a mere peep-hole for a window: a wooden bench, a bed of skins and two or three stools were barely visible in the gloom. In the doorway Oncle Jazon sat ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... thrill. Half an hour after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza, with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of Caecilia Metella, on the Appian Way, and from the bed of the Lago della Colonna, once the celebrated Lake Regillus, to which the name of Lapis Tusculanus or Selce was given; and the Lapis Gabinus or Sperone, a compact volcanic concrete found in the neighbourhood of the ancient Gabii on the road to Tivoli, extensively used in the construction of the earliest monuments, particularly the Tabularium and the huge Arco de Pantani. Brick was also largely employed in the construction ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... 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 to ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... Sir John Bourinot had completed and revised the following pages some months before his lamented death. The book represents more satisfactorily, perhaps, than anything else that he has written the author's breadth of political vision and his concrete mastery of historical fact. The life of Lord Elgin required to be written by one possessed of more than ordinary insight into the interesting aspects of constitutional law. That it has been singularly well presented must be the conclusion of all who ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... more than one. But you'd better produce at least half a dozen. And have some practice-bombs made up, out of concrete or anything, as long as they're the right weight and airfoil and have some way of releasing smoke. Get them done as soon as you have your case designed. We want to be able to make a couple ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... and opened his mouth to speak. But his knees grew weak and he quivered all over like one who beholds the god. The abstract nebulous romance of his pilgrimage had been crystallized, in a flash, into the concrete. "Ay," ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... is often used also for the scientific device of treating an Abstraction as, for the purposes of argument, equivalent to the concrete facts. Thus, in Geometry, a line is treated as having no breadth; in Mechanics, a bar may be supposed absolutely rigid, or a machine to work without friction; in Economics, man is sometimes regarded as actuated ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... in a condition for literary use. The last echoes of the older and more original Icelandic poetry are dying away, and the great product of Icelandic prose, the Saga, still volitat per ora virum, without taking a concrete literary form. It is in the highest degree uncertain whether anything properly to be called Spanish or Italian exists at all—anything but dialects of the lingua rustica showing traces of what Spanish and Italian are to be; though the originals of the great Poema ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... or concrete part, will be no longer devoted to the imagination, but to imaginative beings, to the principal types of imagination that ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... artists and craftsmen with him from France, but "many of the citizens and merchants of Rouen," says the chronicler, "passed over, preferring to be dwellers in London, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading, and better stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic." One concrete example of the resulting growth of trade may be quoted. Before the Conquest, weaving had not been practised in England as a separate craft for the market. By 1165 we find a kind of corporation of weavers at Winchester, who preserved their own customs almost ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... of ferocity. The canine mind is wholly lacking in the power of deduction, its intelligence consisting rather of a highly developed instinctive faculty for retaining impressions which invariably express themselves in some concrete form such as hate, fear, joy, affection and like primitive emotions. Pat, for instance, has been taught to regard strangers as interlopers. He therefore resents the presence of all strangers, and has no mental faculty for distinguishing between strangers, ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... sense of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea, which idea is a consciousness of an amazing and adorable quality in things, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... end of a fortnight or so, the choice of ways was presented to him in a concrete form; and with an abruptness which placed him on the edge of perplexity. It was at a morning meeting of the smaller council. The day was dull, the chamber warm, the business to be transacted monotonous; and Blondel, far from well and interested ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... sixteen-foot cabin complete from foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to see something take form under his hands, had begun to ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... bruised his eloquence, for though you may start a sermon from stones to hit the stars, he must be a practised orator who shall descend out of the abstract to take up a heavy lump of the concrete without unseating himself, and he stammered and came to a flat ending: 'In such a country—well, I venture to say, we have a right to condemn in advance disturbers of the peace, and they must show very good cause indeed for not being summarily ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for reasons which we shall consider later on. Architecture is, like music, a metaphysical art. It deals with the abstract qualities of proportion, balance of form, and direction of line, but without any imitation of the concrete facts of nature. The comparison between architecture and music is an exercise of the fancy which may indeed be pushed too far, but there is really a definite similarity between them which it is useful to notice. For instance, the regular rhythm, or succession of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... there have been issued compilations of the publications of members of the University Faculties. These have shown an ever-increasing body of books, articles, and reviews which may be taken as another concrete evidence of the activity of the members of the Faculty in their various fields. The first two of these lists were issued through the medium of a little informative sheet issued for the University for ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... pouring of them, which throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... exactness in research, as well as the gravity, of the Teuton—his reflectiveness, his going to the bottom of the minutiae of facts, as well as his recourse to his "inner consciousness" when the concrete fails him. Thoroughness, quiet, plodding thoroughness—a looking at things in all their bearings, an exhaustive (as well as exhausting) treatment of a subject, whether of fact or of speculation, a constant striving to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... one day, while Flor, still in her phase of moodiness, stood behind Miss Agatha's chair; and, the passage pleasing him, he read it aloud to Miss Agatha, whom, in the absence of his son, her husband, he was wont to consider his opponent in the abstract, however dear and precious in the concrete. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... life. In fact we have not the option of remaining entirely without ideas on a subject that so vitally concerns ourselves. We must project our thought at times into the future, and form some ideas, more or less concrete, as to what is in store for ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... Water and mud were forced down the relief well under heavy-air pressure until the gas stratum was choked and the flow of gas shut off. The old well, which had made a crater 225 feet in diameter and 50 feet deep, was then permanently closed with concrete. ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... the collar buttons immensely and thought it would be great fun to play with them. She ran and got her ball and the two little friends sat down on the concrete walk to play jackstones, heedless of ...
— Brother and Sister • Josephine Lawrence
... rebel' Com'port comport' | Ex'ile exile' | Rec'ord record' Com'pound compound' | Ex'port export' | Ref'use refuse' Com'press compress' | Ex'tract extract' | Re'tail retail' Con'cert concert' | Fer'ment ferment' | Sub'ject subject' Con'crete concrete' | Fore'cast forecast' | Su'pine supine' Con'duct conduct' | Fore'taste foretaste'| Sur'vey survey' Con fine confine' | Fre'quent frequent' | Tor'ment torment' Con'flict conflict' | Im'part impart' | Tra'ject ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... 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
... ideas [do] not copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? ... Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life? What experiences [may] be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?" ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... your mathematical calculations by the week, and hand over the results to the navigator. But the navigation of the stream of time is another matter. There is no abstract theory of life that can be studied without living oneself. Life is always concrete; it is built up of emotions, and you cannot have the emotions brought into your study, as you can order in your hydrochloric acid or your frog's leg. As well expect anchorites to set the tune for men in the thick of the fight! They ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... more than there is to that of the signification of the word, "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit,— "the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things to the desires of ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... then, and in what each brings to the vanquished, the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply. The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant; the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Stearns and Frost of stove fame and others no longer remembered. These places, with their stately trees and greenhouses and careful lawns, have also been merged into the domain of brick and mortar and concrete. To the right of the market garden, between us and the South Road, lay the level, treeless tract, about fifty acres in extent, which was specifically known as Clark's Field, although all the unused land in the neighborhood had originally ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... such fishing, however agreeable they may be, are not to be identified with a defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the most effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete recollection of some brook that could be fished best or only in that way, or the image of a particular trout that yielded to the temptation of an angleworm after you had flicked fly after fly over him in vain. Indeed, half the zest of brook fishing is in your campaign for ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... abstention from realization, is applied to sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of mystery and of suggestion—an art having affinities with that of painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are eliminated or made prominent ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... ostensible object of the speaker already, on its own account, possesses a commanding attraction, yet will it often happen that the secondary questions, growing out of the leading one, the great elementary themes suggested to the speaker by the concrete case before him—as, for instance, the general question of Test Laws, or the still higher and transcendent question of Religious Toleration, and the relations between the State and religious opinions, or the general history of Slavery and the commerce ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... these moral sermons, in this theoretical moral teaching, in these punishments and anger! Is it credible that, by the aid of abstract and arid dogmas supported by punishment, conscience and altruistic sentiments can be impressed on the brain of a child, which is only accessible to concrete ideas, to sympathy, affection and amusement? We may see daily, in nearly every family, parents finding fault with their children, in a vexatious, irritated or sorrowful tone of voice, to which the children reply by inattention, or tears, or more often by a repetition ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... of the wall which the slaves were repairing was built of great blocks of artificial stone or concrete, which were previously cast in wooden moulds, left to harden, and then put into their assigned places by slave-labour. As Foster was watching the conveyance of these blocks, it suddenly occurred to him ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... sympathies of a not over-interesting home, leans thoughtfully on the foot-rail of her iron bed; the dear, familiar view blurs as she gazes out beyond the dormitory room and its reminiscent treasures of program and photograph, out where the warm light brightens the concrete pillars of the museum and the arboretum with its waving tops, and makes the whole fair landscape one Field of the Cloth ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... had always faintly shimmered from the hole in the outer wall, was gone. As he drove forward headlong, he bruised his nose against the cause of its disappearance. The wall had been repaired with concrete. It was utterly ungnawable, and he slowly retraced his steps to the cellar. He was just in time ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... surrounded by fellow scientists, stood before a bank of closed circuit television monitors in the Frenchman's Flat headquarters building. The scene on the screens was the interior of a massive steel-and-concrete test building several miles up range. Resting on the floor of the building was an open, gallon-sized glass beaker filled with the ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... ships and the sea and of men until, aware that the company had risen, we rose also, and donning hats and coats, set forth, talking still. Together we paced beside docks and along piers that stretched away by the mile, massive structures of granite and concrete, which had only come into being, so he told me, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... and an almost unequalled power of illustration. The thought is always concrete, and he is never satisfied with the vague ideas and abstract conceptions which so easily moved his contemporaries. No speeches, either in English or in German, preserve so much of their freshness. He is almost the only Parliamentary orator ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the breaking to you, for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But even yet I do not expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the 'no' of it. It is more hard still to accept so sad a concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. Tonight I go to prove it. Dare you ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... they marched along the face of the wall before they discovered a means of ingress. Then they came to a narrow cleft about twenty inches wide. Within, a flight of concrete steps, worn hollow by centuries of use, rose before them, to disappear at a sharp turning of the ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... always had been open. The final analysis had not been made. After all, the attitude of the surety companies was only a reflection of the general feeling of practical business and railroad men towards the whole venture. To the companies the proposition had come as a concrete business proffer ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... so concrete a set of images as Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. Browning has made that his own, and what he has done is almost romantic. Almost romantic, I say, because the peculiarities of Browning's personal genius appear too ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... General Goode had been seen reading Plato before the Battle of Seven Pines; and this picturesque incident had contributed the distinction of the scholar to the more effulgent glory of the soldier. But for purely abstract thought—for the thought that did not construct an heroic attitude or a concrete image—there was as little room in the newer industrial system as there had been in the aristocratic society which preceded it. The world still clung to the belief that the business of humanity was confined to the preservation of the institutions which existed in the present moment ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... and coughed; and then abruptly the silence of death would fall upon what is now a business quarter where only an occasional hotel or little old brownstone house—sole reminder of a vanished past when Madison Square was the centre of fashion—lingered between the towering masses of concrete and steel. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... "Why shouldn't I hurt him? They potted Perry, didn't they? What are we supposed to do! Lie around here and let them shoot us full of lead and just smile? Why, you pig-headed, solid concrete—" ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... last gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding. One was that the truth which often is stranger than fiction may also on occasion be a more dangerous commodity to handle. Another was that abruptly he had severed all business connections with Mr. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... the Comtist system, the classification of the sciences. In the front of the inquiry lies one main division, that, namely, between speculative and practical knowledge. With the latter we have no concern. Speculative or theoretic knowledge is divided into abstract and concrete. The former is concerned with the laws that regulate phenomena in all conceivable cases; the latter is concerned with the application of these laws. Concrete science relates to objects or beings; abstract science to events. The ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... successes, and the resounding triumph of his naughtiness there, by a reflex action, secured the vote of London. Posterity has fully sanctioned this particular "judicium Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui generis, and in the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete form in successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this small masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the Great Cham's ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... have made of the later Union, whatever theories may now be indulged in concerning the abstract Union the fathers made in 1789, the concrete Union which was put into effect was the offspring of the States not only in the thoughts of the people, but it was even dependent upon them for aid in several particulars necessary for putting it into operation. Having no electoral machinery, the Union was compelled to ask ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape, magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet now spread ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... matter and form. These are not two acts of ours, face to face with one another; but we assault and carry off the one that is outside us, while that within us tends to absorb and make its own that without. Matter, attacked and conquered by form, gives place to concrete form. It is the matter, the content, that differentiates one of our intuitions from another: form is constant: it is spiritual activity, while matter is changeable. Without matter, however, our spiritual activity would not leave ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... A concrete case will give a clearer grasp of the issue than any abstract reasoning. Our history, recent and remote, affords many examples of the abandoning by our public men of a principle, to defend which they entered public life; and our action on such an occasion is invariably the same—to ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... these horrible thoughts had taken concrete form in her brain, she heard the grounding of arms outside, close to the door, and Desgas' voice shouting ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... satisfactorily with cases in which there are, say, six children and an income of 25s. An income of L1 a week is not even mentioned, though many a London school-girl must know "in the last three years of her school-life" that her mother has not more than this to spend. Translated into concrete quantities of food, clothing, and rent, this "living wage" is found insufficient for daily needs. The teacher therefore is encouraged to ignore the economic conditions of most of her pupils. ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... 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
... of rawness in the picture, a hint of incompleteness, with a promise of much to come. Sage Butte was, perhaps, a trifle barbarous; but its crude frame buildings would some day give place to more imposing piles of concrete and steel. Its inhabitants were passing through a transition stage, showing signs at times of the primitive strain, but, as a rule, reaching out eagerly toward what was new and better. They would make swift progress, and even now he liked the strenuous, ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... the arm and Rectus by the collar, and hurried us to the stairway, and then down as fast as we could go. He made no noise himself, but Rectus and I clumped a good deal. We had to wear our shoes, for the place was paved with rough concrete ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... tell me if you've any idea yourself who the murderer is!" exclaimed Brent. "I'm wearying to get at something concrete!" ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... he said; "its walls are burglar proof, floor and roof are reinforced concrete, there is one door which in addition to its ordinary lock is closed by a sort of steel latch which he lets fall when he retires for the night and which he opens himself personally in the morning. The window is unreachable, there are no communicating doors, and altogether the room is planned to ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... anything, eh? Well, if he says he won't, he won't. No use butting your head against a concrete wall." ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... gaiety, and began talking and laughing, except the father, who sat looking on with a smile at their lively spirits and the jokes of which Dan became the victim. Each family has its own fantastic medium, in which it gets affairs to relieve them of their concrete seriousness, and the Maverings now did this with Dan's engagement, and played with it as an airy abstraction. They debated the character of the embassy which was to be sent down to Boston on their behalf, and it was decided that Eunice had better go with her father, as representing ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... themselves emerge as the residue of similarity amid such great apparent diversity. In this way the abstract demonstrations should form but a small part of the instruction, and should be given when, by familiarity with concrete illustrations, they have come to be felt as the natural embodiment of visible fact. In this early stage proofs should not be given with pedantic fullness; definitely fallacious methods, such as that of superposition, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... they may be employed in cleaning books which have been defaced by writing on the margin, without impairing the text. Lemon juice and the juice of sorrel will also remove ink stains, but not so easily as the concrete acid of lemons, or citric acid. On some occasions it will be found sufficient, only to dip the spotted part in the fine melted tallow of a mould candle, and afterwards wash it in ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... taxation of slave imports was proposed in 1789, but was never enacted: sundry petitions of anti-slavery tenor, presented mostly by Quakers, were given brief consideration in 1790 and again at the close of the century but with no favorable results; and when, in 1797, a more concrete issue was raised by memorials asking intervention on behalf of some negroes whom Quakers had manumitted in North Carolina in disregard of legal restraints and who had again been reduced to slavery, a committee reported ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... of man,—all perfectly synonymous expressions,—such is the common object of political economy and philosophy. To determine the laws of the production and distribution of wealth will be to demonstrate, by an objective and concrete exposition, the laws of reason and liberty; it will be to create philosophy and right a posteriori: whichever way we turn, we are in ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... said—didn't I? that if you insisted upon following these spiritual exercises, the result might be that they would return upon you in some concrete shape, and take possession of you, and lead you into company and surroundings which most of us think ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... subsequent application the moment that he found it might be unpopular and inconvenient. All his quandaries terminated in the same catastrophe; a compromise. Abstract principles with him ever ended in concrete expediency. The aggregate of circumstances outweighed the isolated cause. The primordial tenet, which had been advocated with uncompromising arrogance, gently subsided into some second-rate measure recommended with all the artifice of an ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of the concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind, in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... that evening that the pool be gradually enlarged to make a swimming pool. He enlisted Mr. Wolf's aid for the summer evenings and in a couple of weeks a very creditable pool, brick and concrete lined, made a summer heaven of the back yard for the ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... night, this one upon which the extraordinary incident about to be related took place. It was the kind of night that novelists use when they are handling a mystery that in the abstract would amount to nothing, but which in the concrete of a bit of wild, weird, and windy nocturnalism sends the reader into hysterics. It may be—I shall not attempt to deny it—that had it happened upon another kind of an evening—a soft, mild, balmy June evening, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... afford to build a house merely for its artistic qualities. Yet we feel that we owe it to our neighbors and to the community to make the house sightly. Most of all, we owe it to ourselves, for the product of our plans will be the concrete expression of our personality. Fortunately showiness is neither necessary nor desirable; while artistic qualities are not so much a matter of money as of thought. A few days ago, in a suburb of a Western city, I passed two houses recently constructed. One was simply an enlarged drygoods box with ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... of natural science in the sixteenth century brought the possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit—in the embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober naturalists there were speculative dreamers in ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... Professor William James, for he wrote (Proceedings of S.P.R., vol. xxiii. p. 118): "The refusal of modern 'enlightenment' to treat 'possession' as a hypothesis to be spoken of as even possible, in spite of the massive human tradition based on concrete experience in its favour, has always seemed to me a curious example of the power of fashion in things scientific. That the demon theory (not necessarily a devil theory) will have its innings again is to my mind absolutely ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... purely physical attack 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 ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in this way', Eddington asks, 'that Rutherford rendered concrete the nucleus which his scientific imagination had created?' One thing is certain: 'In every physical laboratory we see ingeniously devised tools for executing the work of sculpture, according to the designs of the theoretical physicist. Sometimes the tool slips and ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... life with no favors and had asked none since, and had made of himself a big success—it was natural that such a man should judge all others by their material achievements. The only quality Y.D. took off his hat to was the ability to do things. And Y.D.'s idea of things was very concrete; it had to do with steers and land, with hay and money and men. It was by such things he measured success. And Zen was disposed to agree with him. Why not? It was ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... outfalls constructed of glazed stoneware socketed pipes surrounded with concrete, as shown in Fig. 21, cast iron pipes are used in the majority of cases. There is considerable variation in the design of the joints for the latter class of pipes, some of which are shown in Figs. 22, 23, and 24. Spigot and socket joints (Fig. ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... halts on the line of march, I found the mouth of what must have been a coal-pit of large dimensions. The entrance of this was on the bank of a dry stream, and several masses of what appeared to be a concrete of lignite and coal betokened the existence of the latter in a purer form within the bowels of the surrounding country. This I showed to Omer Pacha, who said that he would adopt my suggestion of having ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that—to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—"human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him." Enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youth—when he gushed into "dearests" in his letters—we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Offices, got together under these strange circumstances, cannot well be expected to be the best that human ingenuity could devise; the wonder rather is to see them so good as they are. Who made them, ask me not. Made they clearly were; for we see them here in a concrete condition, writing despatches, and drawing salary with a view to buy pudding. But how those Offices in Downing Street were made; who made them, or for what kind of objects they were made, would be hard to say at present. Dim visions and phantasmagories gathered from the Books of ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... be cast of concrete as Fig. 39. This requires a mold or form, and takes considerable planning to insure success. A form is made whose inside dimensions are those of the outside of the bird house, and of the desired shape. A second ...
— Bird Houses Boys Can Build • Albert F. Siepert |
