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Concrete   Listen
adjective
Concrete  adj.  
1.
United in growth; hence, formed by coalition of separate particles into one mass; united in a solid form. "The first concrete state, or consistent surface, of the chaos must be of the same figure as the last liquid state."
2.
(Logic)
(a)
Standing for an object as it exists in nature, invested with all its qualities, as distinguished from standing for an attribute of an object; opposed to abstract. Hence:
(b)
Applied to a specific object; special; particular; opposed to general. See Abstract, 3. "Concrete is opposed to abstract. The names of individuals are concrete, those of classes abstract." "Concrete terms, while they express the quality, do also express, or imply, or refer to, some subject to which it belongs."
Concrete number, a number associated with, or applied to, a particular object, as three men, five days, etc., as distinguished from an abstract number, or one used without reference to a particular object.
Concrete quantity, a physical object or a collection of such objects.
Concrete science, a physical science, one having as its subject of knowledge concrete things instead of abstract laws.
Concrete sound or movement of the voice, one which slides continuously up or down, as distinguished from a discrete movement, in which the voice leaps at once from one line of pitch to another.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books



... is a privilege to hear you say so. I shall recall the fact to her Majesty's Government in the report I shall make upon my tour of the province. I have a feeling that the Queen's pleasure in the devotion of her distinguished French subjects may take some concrete form." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... practicable, be of brick, stone, concrete or iron. If necessarily of wood they shall be extra heavy, located in a dry place and open to the ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... and premature convictions to value rightly his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely because he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of his own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where he got his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... She was not really there, sitting in Cossethay church beside her little girl. She was not living the apparent life of her days. She belonged to somewhere else. He felt it poignantly, as something real and natural. But a pang of fear for his own concrete life, that was only Cossethay, hurt him, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... word from the two lights spoken of in the fourteenth verse, as the singular is different from the plural; and the thing signified by it is as distinct from the things spoken of in the fourteenth verse, as the abstract is from the concrete; as, when I say of the first, "light travels 195,000 miles per second," but mean a totally distinct subject when I say, "Extinguish the lights." The Hebrew words are even more palpably different, the word for light, in the third ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... quoted. His wit is the wit of the Londoner—the wit that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. It is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. Apt Shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... taking them in their broadest sense, are as much entitled to a biographical dictionary of their own as are clergymen, race-horses, or artists in ferro-concrete, who all, I am assured, have their own "Who's Who"? Have not the medical men their Directory, the lawyers their List, the peers their Peerage? There are books which record the names and the particulars of musicians, schoolmasters, stockbrokers, saints and bookmakers, and I dare say there ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... however, exceeds in interest the discovery, in 1833, of a bath and tesselated pavement behind the Deanery walls in South Street. The walls were of Heavitree stone and brick, and the original pavement was of black-and-white tesserae set in concrete. The associated remains of a thirteenth-century encaustic-tile pavement indicates the use of the old Roman bath a thousand years or so after it had been made. Several other tesselated pavements are recorded as having been found in Pancras Lane, on the site of Bedford Circus, and on ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath

... quality; and this is also the case with sugar-cane and tobacco, both of which are grown generally over the continent. There is also a species of palm growing on the borders of the Tanganyika Lake, which yields a concrete oil very much like, if not the same as, the palm-oil of Western Africa; but this is limited in quantity, and would never be of much value. Salt, which is found in great quantity in pits near the Malagarazi river, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... to a clear recognition and frank statement of their true position. To know and understand Socialism as it is, we must lay aside both the claims of Socialists and the attacks of their opponents and confine ourselves to the concrete activities of Socialist organizations, the grounds on which their decisions have been reached, and the reasons by ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... had been yanked to a stop and had stalled. The driver started it again, shifted to four-wheel drive, and tried to ram forward. The jeep was fixed immovably, as though set in concrete. ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee

... centers, as for instance in 'Macbeth,' The Ruin of a Man through Yielding to Evil. Sometimes, however, as in a lyric poem, the effect intended may be the rendering or creation of a mood, such as that of happy content, and in that case the poem may not have an easily expressible concrete theme. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... The concrete result of Carl's work with the Immigration Commission was the clean-up of labor camps all over California. From unsanitary, fly-ridden, dirty makeshifts were developed ordered sanitary housing accommodations, designed and executed by experts in ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... from the axis, inasmuch as the basal portion of the leaf is often adherent to the stem for some distance, though still recognisable as foliar not axial in its nature. In the same manner, the corolla and androecium may be concrete at the base, so that the stamens are for convenience' sake described as inserted into the tube of the corolla, though it is generally admitted that both stamens and petals are really hypogynous, and ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... Merely a stern 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, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... huge, its walls so thick that the middle ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like seared rocks, yet still suggesting their original shapes as shrines, cippi, and sarcophagi. There is a wondrous succession of high reliefs figuring the dead in groups of three and five; ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... consistently acted. It is clear, therefore, that he had studied the campaigns of the great Corsican in order to discover the principles on which military success is based; that having studied and reflected on those principles, and the effect their application produced, in numerous concrete cases, they became so firmly imbedded in his mind as to be ever present, guiding him into the right path, or warning him against the wrong, whenever he had to deal with a strategic ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... familiar with the huge strides that have been made by the introduction of the rubber-cored ball. We don't want to plagiarize, although a rubber-cored cricket ball is a nice idea. Why not aim at the opposite extreme and try a ball "reinforced" with concrete? The tingling of the batsman's fingers which might result could be neutralised by the use of a rubber-faced bat. This reform would, we believe, have one happy consequence. People wouldn't be so keen to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various

... some one down there," observed Kennedy, as we picked our way across the steel girders, piles of rails, and around huge machines for mixing concrete. ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve

... Saudi Arabia has reinforced its concrete-filled security barrier along sections of the now fully demarcated border with Yemen to stem illegal cross-border activities; Kuwait and Saudi Arabia continue discussions on a maritime ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... an hour and a half, pouring in a little hot water critically from time to time in order to make the butter come. This exercise may be recommended as an admirable corrective to foolish flights of imagination. There is something concrete about butter-making which counteracts an overplus of sentiment— especially when the butter will not come. And ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... down the cracked concrete walk, passed the big plate-glass windows of Murphy's General Store which were a kind of fetish in Glen Oaks. But Doctor Spechaug wasn't concerned with the cultural significance of the windows. He was concerned with ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton

... space there can be no time; and hence that conception of spirit which realizes it as devoid of the element of space must realize it as being devoid of the element of time also; and we therefore find that the conception of spirit as pure Thought, and not as concrete Form, is the conception of it as subsisting perfectly independently of the elements of time and space. From this it follows that if the idea of anything is conceived as existing on this level it can only represent that thing as being actually present here and now. In this view ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... characteristic phrase, says: "He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the hypocrite, flatterer, and scoundrel." This sums up the essence of the social philosophy of these three thinkers, as seen by Burke's insistence on the value of concrete details in Coleridge's use of them in his Lay Sermon, and in Carlyle's belief in the importance of the single individual life ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... temples, as this was a style of building almost exclusively Italian. The best representative of this style of sacred edifices is the Pantheon at Rome, which has come down to our own times in a state of wonderful preservation. This structure is about 140 feet in diameter. The great concrete dome which vaults the building, is one of the boldest pieces of masonry executed by the master-builders of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... with the end of the tell-tale pipe left open. If waste pipes are to take the discharge from sinks in which chemicals are thrown, either chemical lead or terra-cotta pipe should be used. If terra-cotta is used, it should have at least 6 inches reinforced concrete around it and the joints of ...
— Elements of Plumbing • Samuel Dibble

... school was started and had the good fortune of its first four years' life under the care of a notable gentlewoman, Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at the time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr to her devotion to the children, a year later; and a great Celtic cross in concrete, standing high on the bluff across the river, now marks the spot of her own selection—a spot that gives a fine view of Denali—where her body rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary value of ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... and sisters, is merely to beg the question. What is variation? The internal secretion theory of the process offers, for the first time, an explanation that is coherent and comprehensive, based upon concrete and detailed observations. It provides an adequate interpretation of the numberless hereditary gradations and transitions, blendings and mixtures. It suggests a control of heredity in ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... Jackson in advanced age, about 1777. The book contains much personal reminiscence and observation on life but little concrete detail ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen

... had concrete evidence of the mood. Glancing behind me, I saw a white, vengeful face peer from behind a tree-trunk, a hand lift, a shining dart speed from it straight toward Rador's back. Instinctively I thrust him aside. He turned ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and to save the boy is not only constitutional, but is withal a great mercy." No other man in our history has so fully possessed the power of presenting an argument in concrete form, overthrowing all the logic of assailants, and touching the chords of public feeling with a tenderness which becomes ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... for a sketch of the woman movement on the continent, and indeed of any step in advance, is of course France, where ideas, not facts, stand out the more prominently; for, in questions of reform, the abstract must always precede the concrete,—public opinion must be convinced before it will accept an innovation. This has been the role of France in Europe ever since the great revolution; it is her role to-day. She is the agitator of the old world, and agitation is the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... diversities being themselves ultimate, and the priceless pearl of truth lying, if anywhere, not in large theoretic apprehension of the general, but in minute vision of the particular; in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, at this particular moment, and from this unique point of view—that for you, this for me—now, but perhaps ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... committee of the 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 Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused, seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... kind of father. One who has never tested the merit of walks 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 will astonish ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... 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

... effect of this piece is altogether favourable to virtue, and to the parent and nurse of virtue, a pious conviction of the moral government of the world. The play contains an 'anatomy' of passion, not a 'picture' of it in a concrete form, such as the works of Richardson and of Rousseau present, a picture fitted to excite 'feelings' of baneful effect upon the mind, rather than to awaken 'thought', which counteracts all such mischief. Indeed I think no man would have sought my Father's daily society who was not ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... the boarders whom I consulted on the subject attempted to persuade me that it was the story that had the whiskers; but it is nonsensical to suppose that a purely abstract affair like an untruth could be furnished with capillary growth, which belongs to the concrete department. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern Magnum Opus have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us how "the glorious fellowship of living men," which constituted the personal University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by slow ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... liver was the seat of life was perhaps held by the Gonds. But the primary idea seems necessarily to have been that the life was equally distributed all over the body. And since, as will be seen subsequently, the savage was incapable of conceiving the abstract idea of life, he thought of it in a concrete form as part of the substance ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... issues: limited natural freshwater resources; large concrete or natural rock water catchments ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... of love, we see, are not abstract, but specific and concrete. Love calls forth persons and reunites life with life by providing the relationships in which the created needs of men are met. The environment of saving love is needed to produce out of our biological nature and the physical world in which we live the image of God in each of us and the Kingdom of ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe

... consciousness to find his feet shackled and fastened to rings set in the concrete of the cavern wall. His head throbbed horribly. He raised his hands and found a huge bump on his head, from which thickened blood trickled sluggishly down his cheek. The cavern was flooded with light. On the wall before ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek

... friends of his schooldays. A dreamer, indeed, he always was, but he had learned from Bishop Butler, whom he reverenced profoundly and spoke of as "the Copernicus of ethics," that there is no practice more fatal to moral strength than dreaming divorced from action. Some concrete act, some definite thing to be done, was now always in his mind, but always, it may be added, as the realisation of some principle arrived at by serious and accurate thinking. He had acquired clear convictions, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... offensive began while these fine days held, they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it. Think of the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack! In the popular mind the notion of 'a German God' was taking actual concrete shape. A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser wished—it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial speeches and telegrams, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... attempt to give concrete form to the principles of the Reformers seems to have been made in the Kingdom of Meath, about the year 1100. But the primary evidence for the fact is of much later date. There are extant some constitutions of Simon Rochfort, ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... such as you might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... are further reasons; for the poets of England are greater than its moral philosophers; and it is of the nature of the poetic art that, while eschewing system, it presents the strife between right and wrong in concrete character, and therefore with a fulness and truth impossible to the abstract thought ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... that they are still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new philosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject- matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are those of theatric presentation, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... Nevertheless she threw this possibility into the burden she was going to assume for humanity, and felt happier as the burden waxed heavier. The innate hunger for sacrifice was gratified, with only the definite prospect of suffering from loss of complexion; a concrete living shape was given to the vague longing that possessed her; and she cheerfully marched on, strong in the hope of the love and reverence she was sure her devotion would gain. Ah, sweet Haguna, Haguna! Sweating enough and toil enough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... paradox. When, e.g., He said, "Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also," He was ready to risk the possibility of being misunderstood by some prosaic hearer, that He might the more effectually arouse men to a neglected duty. His language was concrete, not abstract; He taught by example and illustration; He thought, and taught others to think, in pictures. How often is the phrase, "The kingdom of heaven is like unto——" on His lips! Moreover, His illustrations were always such as common folk ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson

... as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century is the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has exprest itself in concrete form. Within less than twoscore years Italy has ceased to be only a geographical expression; and Germany has given itself boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for the fatherland by the martial lyric of a century ago. Hungary has asserted ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... 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

... storms of twenty centuries have beaten in vain. Looking at the state of the Roman Empire when Cicero died, who would not declare its doom? But it did "retrick its beams," not so much by the hand of one man, Augustus, as by the force of the concrete power collected within it—"Quod non imber edax non aquilo impotens Possit diruere."[208] Cicero with patriotic gallantry thought that even yet there might be a chance for the old Republic—thought that by his eloquence, by his vehemence of words, he could turn ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... undoubtedly, some principles of universal application; and the old critics often expounded them with admirable common-sense and force. But like general tenets of morality, they are apt to be commonplaces, whose specific application requires knowledge of concrete facts. When the critics assumed that the forms familiar to themselves were the only possible embodiments of those principles, and condemned all others as barbarous, they were led to pass judgments, such, for example, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution: to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough for the boy to say he preferred business, and that he wanted uncle Silas to take him into his upholstery shop; and he never, so long as ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... with a coating of concrete; the walls are immensely thick; it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter; it is isolated and sombre; standing apart from the other state buildings, sullen and decaying, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... of labour. As the heavy drops trickled from chin and nose into the meal around the grindstone, it pleased Moussa Isa to reflect that his enemy should eat of it. Since the shadow of Moussa was pollution to these travesties of men and warriors, let them have a little concrete pollution also. But in the cook-house, while arm and soul wearied together, one heavy day of copper sky and brazen earth, first eye and then foot, fell upon a piece of tin, the lid of some empty milk-tin or like vessel. ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... no account of Abraham Lincoln can omit his use of AEsop or of AEsop-like stories to enforce his ideas. His homely stories were so "pat" that there was nothing left for the opposition to say. Only one who grasps the heart of a problem can use concrete illustrations with ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... comradeship of camp life, where they made many acquaintances and mayhap friends, are now scattered in all walks of civilian life. While their minds are yet alive with facts and figures, time always effaces concrete absorptions. The time will come when a printed record of Battery D ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman

... profanation of too utilitarian progress. However commercialised Paris might become, you could not cheapen the environs of Notre Dame! Whatever happens to us, let us hope that we will always keep Washington Square as it is today,—our little and dear bit of fine, concrete history, the one perfect page of our old, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... shall see that the relation of the Son to the Father as we find it explained by Clement and other fathers of the church, remains dark and misty. We have no concept without a word, and philology has shown us how every word, even the most concrete, is based on a concept. We cannot think of "tree" without the word or a hieroglyphic of some kind. We can even say that, as far as we are concerned, there is no tree, except in language, for in the nature of things there are only oaks or beeches, but not and never a ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... famous Exercitia, which became his instrument for rapidly passing neophytes through spiritual training similar to his own. It was here that he first distinguished two kinds of visions, infernal and celestial. Here also he grew familiar with the uses of concrete imagination;, and understood how the faculty of sensuous realization might be made a powerful engine for presenting the past of sacred history or the dogmas of orthodox theology under shapes of fancy to the mind. Finally, in all the experiences of Manresa, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... the subject as though it were the first part of the definition, viz. the genus; but we give it the second place, which is that of the difference; thus we say that simitas is "a curvature of the nose." But if we take accidents in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates in the concrete, the relation begins in the subject and terminates at the accident: for "a white thing" is "something that has whiteness." Accordingly in defining this kind of accident, we place ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... successive themes of Browning's Parleyings, and they are important and interesting themes. Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a danse Macabre. The spirit of acquiescence—strenuous not indolent acquiescence—with ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... flooring, walls and ceiling of the stage to be of soft wood, into which nails and screws may be driven; or if the main construction is of brick, concrete or metal, some inner wooden scaffolding or other overhead rigging capable of supporting ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden

... which God should justify the ungodly, Jew or Gentile, and yet maintain inviolate those universal moral relations between Himself and man for which law is the compendious expression. It does not matter whether we suppose him to start from the concrete instance of the Jewish law, and to generalise on the basis of it; or to start from the universal conception of law, and to recognise in existing Jewish institutions the most available and definite illustration of it: in either ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney

... acreage of cultivated lands, Willard Holmes came to appreciate the desert-bred surveyor's view of the danger and insistently urged his employers to supply him with funds to replace the temporary wooden structures with safe and lasting works of concrete and steel. ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... walk in the park, was busy with the same thoughts. They were more concrete in form, but they amounted to the same thing. She knew that she could be happy with Janet and keep her from being homesick, but the thought of the other girls at school made her uneasy. They were nice girls, all of them, and they were ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill

... able to find contentment in the mere presentation of beauty. Even where he dealt with the concrete there was always something to destroy the semblance of reality. The world that was revealed to his vision was a surface-world, for he had not pierced it by experience, but only dimly through the medium ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... know no one who is so capable of throwing himself into one matter for the sake of accomplishing that one thing at a time. That's concrete." And so the red colour faded away from poor Adelaide's face, ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... active, sense of that word,—should accept form, as well as give form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk a concrete illustration—among our American poets, Bryant, in the perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development, may be said to represent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears in the later, more protracted, phase of his genius, romanticism is represented. The "Thanatopsis" ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... hideous; something which ran swiftly but stealthily, with a motion which sent a thrill of horror through her veins. She started up with a little shriek, shaking off the unlucky spider as if it had been the Black Death in concrete. Then she looked round with flaming cheeks, to see if her scream had been heard by the hay-makers. No, they were far away, and too busy to take heed of her. But the charm was broken. Queen Hildegarde had plenty of courage of a certain sort, but she could not ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

... overhear the teacher inquiring of the superintendent how she should proceed in order to inculcate in her pupils a sense of responsibility. We should be acutely alert to catch every word of the superintendent's reply. If he were dealing with such a concrete problem as Milo and the calf, his response would probably be satisfactory; but when such an abstract quality as responsibility is presented to him his reply might be vague and unsatisfactory. His thinking may have ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... to me, the ace of spades ghoulishly visible, its ominousness tempered only by the word "Bicycle" printed across it. "Don't hold out on your Uncle Jacson or I might have the boys take you for a little trip. A block of concrete tastefully inscribed 'A Weener' ought to make an amusing base for ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... Grease is a concrete oil formed in the interstices of the cellary tissue. It sometimes agglomerates in animals whom art or nature has so predisposed, such as pigs, fowls, ortolans and snipe. In some of these animals it loses its insipidity and acquires a slight ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin

... Strauss paper is seen to be one of such enormous power, and its aim appears to us so lofty, that, whatever our views may be concerning the nature of the person assailed, we are forced to conclude that, to Nietzsche at least, he was but the incarnation and concrete example of the evil and danger then threatening to overtake his country, which it was the object of this essay ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... but a dream, I said above, In concrete truth deficient, Belonging to the region of The wholly Unconditioned: Yet, when I see how strange the ways Of undergrad. and Don are, Methinks it was, in classic phrase, Not upar less ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley

... exertions I have built up one of the business interests of the place. I will not stoop to boast of the part I have taken in the prosperity of this place; but I will say that no public object has been wanting—that my support has not been wanting—from the first proposition to concrete the sidewalks of this village to the introduction of city waterworks and an improved system of drainage, and—er—electric lighting. So much for my standing in a public capacity! As for my business capacity, I would gladly let that speak for itself, if that capacity had not been ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... Poetry" and the "Essay on Style" are immensely suggestive. As an example of ingenious humor "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" is often recommended; but it has this serious fault, that it is not humorous. For a concrete example of De Quincey's matter and manner there is nothing better than "Levana or Our Ladies of Sorrow" (from the Suspiria), with its mater lachrymarum Our Lady of Tears, mater suspiriorum Our Lady of Sighs, and that strange phantom, forbidding and terrible, mater tenebrarum ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... his fright (the dog had not actually bitten him) he had blundered, and struck his knee-cap violently against a bollard close by the water's edge, and staggering under the anguish of it, had lost his footing and collapsed overboard. Then, finding that his fingers could take no hold on the slippery concrete wall of the basin, with his sound leg he had pushed himself out from it and grasped the barge's head-rope. All this, between groans, he managed to explain to the policeman, who, having sent for an ambulance stretcher, called for volunteers ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... three were passing the centre of the cantilever, between the gigantic towers, whose iron heels were socketed far below in the top-plates of the massive concrete piers, built on the very edge of deep water. From this point the outer arm of the cantilever extended far out over the broad chasm of the strait, where, a hundred and fifty feet beneath its unfloored level, the broken ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... Moravians. In the early writings of Gregory the Patriarch, and in the catechisms of the Bohemian Brethren, the "essentials" are such things, and such things only, as faith, hope, love and the doctrines taught in the Apostles' Creed; and the "non-essentials," on the other hand, are such visible and concrete things as the church on earth, the ministry, the sacraments, and the other means of grace. In essentials they could allow no compromise; in non-essentials they gladly agreed to differ. For essentials they often shed their ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... had despatched him back to the hotel with instructions to shadow Weiler no matter where the trail led. It was then that McCorquodale had learned of an expedition that was being planned by the bootlegging gang the railroad was anxious to locate, and got concrete evidence that Weiler was the Eastern agent of the whisky runners. The leader was a notorious character named Red McIvor and this man had arranged to meet Weiler at a ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... guns, sheltered here and there over the scraggy plain within the pill-boxes that have of late been substituted for the vanishing trench lines. Artillery bombardments by the Allies have so devastated certain regions that trenches have become impossible; hence the concrete pillboxes. ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry

... capitalist, and the abstract thought soon took the concrete form of a great square plastered building wherein a couple of hundred of his swarthy countrymen worked with deft nimble fingers at a rate of pay which no English artisan could have accepted. Within a few ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... our own; and certainly these lie little in qualities of kindness and generosity. Amongst both nations, if you have a friendly disposition you will find friends easily, and receive kindness on all sides. Perhaps, as one concrete instance is worth many assertions, I may describe a visit I paid many years ago to a family who invited me because a marriage had recently connected us. I had seen some of the family at the wedding, and had been surprised to receive a warm invitation, not for a week-end and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... be all the better understood if we could get a concrete case for illustration, and, fortunately, this is possible by turning to the evidence of India. "What we know of the manner in which the states of Upper India were founded," says ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... passion for pink-scented notes and a correspondence full of madrigals and sparkling wit was declared to be the last phase of the tender passion; love had reached the Doctrinaire stage; or had passed, in other words, from the concrete to the abstract. The illustrious lady, so cruelly ridiculed under the name of Octavie by Beranger, had conceived (so it was said) the gravest fears. The correspondence was languishing. The more Octavie displayed her wit, the cooler grew the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... begins with the concrete not unfrequently finds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions. This is the point to which the performance of Cherubino's part by Pauline Lucca at the Scala twenty years ago has led me—that I have to settle with ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... patriots, who all appeared to be quitting their earthly tabernacles in convulsions, ruffled shirts, and a whirl of torn banners, bomb shells, and buff and blue arms and legs. The statuary also was massive and concrete, but rather wearying to examine; for the colossal ladies and gentlemen, carried no cards of introduction in face or figure; so, whether the meditative party in a kilt, with well-developed legs, shoes like army slippers, and a ponderous nose, was Columbus, Cato, or Cockelorum Tibby, the tragedian, ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott

... from an abstract, speculative phase of the Monroe Doctrine, took on the concrete and somewhat urgent form of security for our trans-Isthmian routes against foreign interference towards the middle of this century, when the attempt to settle it was made by the oft-mentioned Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, signed April 19, 1850. ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... matter of selective 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 ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... modern school of musical criticism does not hold coloratura singing in very high esteem. We demand nowadays expression, passion, and emotion; we want vocal music to portray definite sentiments, to express concrete feelings. Florid singing is not adapted to this form of expressiveness. It is only sensuously beautiful; it speaks to the ear, but does ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... have scorned the subterfuge; but to-day there was money in his purse; London awaited him with expectant arms, the very air was fraught with a magic whereby the impossible might become concrete fact, wherein dreams might become realities; was not she herself, as she stood before him lithe and vigorous in all the perfection of her warm young womanhood—was she not the very embodiment of those dreams that had haunted him sleeping and waking? Verily. Therefore with this ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... Admiralty made a public offer of a 'naval holiday,' a suspension of new construction by mutual consent. The Imperial Chancellor responded only by suggesting that the proposal was entirely unofficial, by asking for concrete proposals, and by saying that the idea constituted a great progress; and his naval estimates in 1913 were half a million ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... methods of teaching and subject matter. The other aims to give the simple, concrete facts of psychology as the science of the mind. The former presupposes a close relationship between psychology and methods of teaching and assumes that psychology is studied chiefly as an aid to teaching. The latter is less complicated. The plan contemplates the teaching of ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle

... this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... in vogue, as if he were a discoverer, he invariably shrank from its 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

... in cheap baths is admirably formed by simple unglazed tile pavement over concrete. A slight roughness is very agreeable to the feet. Glazed tiles are inadmissible, as they become too hot for the naked feet; and if the slightest moisture come upon them they are rendered dangerously slippery. In elaborate baths, marble, and marble mosaics may be used, ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop

... too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, the usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of mind impelled him, but each expressed something more than himself. Lockhart was a dense, substantial Briton, with a taste for the concrete, and Hawthorne was a thin New ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... 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 ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... the same is in a measure true of it to-day, was rather a bundle of provinces, some of which owned scarcely a nominal allegiance to the ruler in Cabul, than a concrete state. Herat and Candahar were wholly independent, the Ghilzai tribes inhabiting the wide tracts from the Suliman ranges westward beyond the road through Ghuznee, between Candahar and Cabul, and northward into the ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes

... the volva forms a universal veil, that is, a layer of fungus tissue which entirely envelops the young plant. In the button stage, where this envelope runs over the cap, it is more or less free from it, that is, it is not "concrete" with the surface of the pileus. As the pileus expands and the stem elongates, the volva is ruptured in different ways according to the species. In some the volva splits at the apex and is left as a "cup" at the base of the stem. In others it splits circularly, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... said Bannon, "he told me that we've got a contract for a new house at Indianapolis. It's going to be concrete, from the spiles up—there ain't anything like it in the country. I'm going down next week to take charge of the job, and if you'd like to go along as my assistant, ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin

... by a camp cook and his assistant, the farm manager and half a dozen hands. The partners themselves slept in a tent. There was also a cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well diggers who were working on the new buildings. They drove out in Fords from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn't go home till after supper. The wagon shed of the old horse barn served as a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... handkerchief, instead of nailing up a curtain. The principal advantage is that you may thereby go on deceiving yourself, for this reason: few sentiments are wholly matter of fact; but when they are half so, you make them concrete by deliberately seeking either to crush or conceal them, and you are doubly betrayed—betrayed to the besieging eye and to yourself. When a sentiment has grown to be a passion (mercifully may I be spared!) different tactics are required. By that time, you will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy's voice ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... 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 to their stories, winning some ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... sewerage system of a large hotel is a matter of primary importance. At El Tovar the matter was given more than usual care and foresight. An antiseptic system was installed, at a cost of over twenty thousand dollars. The sewage is conveyed by underground pipes a long distance to solid concrete tanks, where the solids are disposed of by natural processes. The liquids pass through eight filter beds, and then enter the ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... sagacious animals, but not with many more abstractions of a higher sort, and where the vocabulary is small the power of abstraction is wont to be as weak in adults as in children. The latter, to be sure, acquire the words for the abstract with more difficulty and later than those for the concrete, but have them stamped more firmly on the mind (for, when the word-memory fails, proper names and nouns denoting concrete objects are, as a rule, first forgotten). But it would not be admissible, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... vision of Mediterranean blue, hillside and valley green and brown, roof-top red, wall gray and mountain white. At the end of your orgy, instead of distinct pictures, you carry away an impression of the Riviera in which the Place Massena is a concrete image and the rest no more than dancing bits of colored glass. Saint-Raphael and Menton are the luncheon breaks of two days, and the Grande Corniche is a beautiful vague mountain road ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... was I. You didn't answer my question, Soligen. Why stick your neck out? Most of you Telly reporters, stick it out in some concrete pillbox with lots of telescopic equipment." He added bitterly, "And usually away from what's ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... edict of expulsion scientific study had been stimulated by the coming of French and Spanish scholars to measure a degree of the earth's surface at the equator. The coming of Humboldt in 1801 still further encouraged inquiry and research. The new spirit was given concrete expression by Dr. Francisco Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, a physician of native descent, in page 298 El nuevo Luciano, a work famous in the literary and the political history of South America. In this work Dr. Espejo attacked the prevailing educational and ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... horizontal strips of wood about a foot apart, hoping to encourage the mud-daubing birds he'd seen on the wall at Datura to plaster their nests onto his barn, and shop for insects in his fields. Lacking concrete, he'd constructed a roofless stone hut abutting the barn to serve as his manure shed. The farmhouse itself was a bit gay, having an inside toilet to cheat the Murnan winters and a sunporch for Martha's ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang

... of no common political and administrative capacity—a statesman whose strong popular sympathies, practical wisdom, contempt of popular catchwords, knowledge of and respect for concrete facts; above all, whose signal freedom from the characteristic weaknesses and vices of French statesmanship, rendered him the fittest of all men to direct the destiny of France, whose counsels and guidance would have saved her from ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... was 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 ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... instant when our expectation is most kindled toward the glory of the dawn and of the day which it foretokens. "The vanguard of his strength" in the next clause suggests the purely fanciful. This mixture of the concrete and the abstract does not go back to sensation, a thing worth noting and so the visualization is destroyed. The dependent clause brings up a new visualization, a V2, in the "dust of a small town." The second sentence ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith

... Colman and imagine him cherishing sordid views of life. Asked what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, "The imaginative intellect." He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had nothing to do. He would stand wrapped in the delight of what he counted its beauty, and yet more in the delight that his was the mind that ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... that day they discussed ways and means. His definite picture of getting married and staying in hotels in Sydney had made the dream concrete. She had hitherto simply seen them both glittering along in an aura of Deliverance. Right at the back of her mind she still clung to pictures of knightly mail, obtained from she had not the slightest idea where. But that fitted badly with hotels in Sydney and conventions he was ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... ancestors (I wonder that I was allowed any ancestors: why wasn't I created at once out of some stray scrap of protoplasm?) were supposed to have held in the colonial period. As I gazed upon Washington Flagg I thrilled with the sense that I was gazing upon the materialization in a concrete form of all the ghostly brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces which I had ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... no occasion to intermeddle in matters which belong to the general Government." Hamilton in reply went to the root of the matter. "Our system is such as still to leave the public peace of the Union at the mercy of each state government." He proceeded to give a concrete instance: "For example, a party comes from a county of Virginia into Pennsylvania, and wantonly murders some friendly Indians. The national Government, instead of having power to apprehend the murderers and bring them to justice, is obliged to make ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford

... circumstances of its literal occurrence, the miracle is rich in symbolism and suggestion. By what law or principle the effect of gravitation was superseded, so that a human body could be supported upon the watery surface, man is unable to affirm. The phenomenon is a concrete demonstration of the great truth that faith is a principle of power, whereby natural forces may be conditioned and controlled.[722] Into every adult human life come experiences like unto the battling of the storm-tossed voyagers ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage



Words linked to "Concrete" :   sand, touchable, concrete jungle, practical, tangible, cover, concrete representation, ferroconcrete, paving, real, solid, concreteness, concretion, reinforced concrete, building material, objective, concrete mixer, abstract, paving material, solidify



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