Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Concrete   Listen
verb
Concrete  v. t.  
1.
To form into a mass, as by the cohesion or coalescence of separate particles. "There are in our inferior world divers bodies that are concreted out of others."
2.
To cover with, or form of, concrete, as a pavement.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books



... looking down into the reservoir, which was almost full of water, but which was slowly running out through the different gates, some to concrete drinking troughs where thirsty cattle congregated, and some to distant meadows where it supplied moisture for the grass on which the steers of Diamond X Second fed. From the slightly ruffled surface of the reservoir, as the evening wind blew across the water, the ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... Socotra," the Kuria Muria Islands on the Arabian coast, in which M. Pauthier longs to trace these veritable Male and Female Isles, will be nearer than any others. Marco's statement that they had a bishop subject to the metropolitan of Socotra certainly looks as if certain concrete islands had been associated with the tale. Friar Jordanus (p. 44) also places them between India the Greater and India Tertia (i.e. with him Eastern Africa). Conti locates them not more than 5 miles from Socotra, and yet ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... as glorious a spectacle as the world can show. Not one of these men but heartily believed himself justified in reviling the traitor to his class, the betrayer of confiding innocence. Remember, too, how it facilitates speech to have a concrete topic on which to enlarge; in this matter a West End drawing-room and the Hoxton coffee-shop are akin. Regularity of procedure was at an end; question grew to debate, and debate was riot. Mr. Cullen succeeded Mr. Cowes and roared himself ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... means to us in Homeburg. We don't suffer half so much from fires as we would from the lack of them; and when this new concrete construction makes the world fire-proof, and the Homeburg fire department rusts away and disappears, we will mourn it even more sincerely than we did the opera house with a real gallery, which got over-heated one night twenty-five ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... indicative of the vigor of youth, the energy associated with the rising of the sun. The friezes about the base represent the triumph of light over darkness, and the merry play of waters suggests perpetual activity. The concrete bowl is of goodly proportions and within the pool are sculptured figures representing mythical creatures ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt

... This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... Zeppelin sheds?" asked Beale. "You will find it amongst the others. All the old Zepp. hangars throughout Germany are to be put in a state of repair and turned into skating-rinks for the physical development of young Germany. Wonderful concrete floors are to be laid down, all the dilapidations are to be made good, and the bands will play ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... a character like Butler's "A Flatterer" to appreciate Gally's point. The Theophrastan method had been to describe a character operatively—that is, through the use of concrete dramatic incident illustrating the particular vice. The seventeenth-century character is too often merely a showcase for the writer's wit. One frequently finds a succession of ingenious metaphors, each redefining from a slightly different ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally

... under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis), reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation 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 ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... good results. Last fall, we tried the method used and described by Dr. Crane and Dr. McKay in the 1946 report of this Association. Crimp top cans were used with nail holes in the top and bottom. Instead of using regular storage facilities, the cans were stored in a concrete block storage pit built below the floor of the garage. This proved very successful. Not only were the nuts in excellent condition for eating in the spring, sweet and of good flavor, but a much larger percentage of the seed germinated. This ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various

... to a wide place where a sign announced the headquarters of the German commandant. The sides of his underground cavern were all solid concrete, with cement inner walls separating four rooms. Paper and artistic burlaping covered the walls and ceilings, and rugs were on the floors. The furniture was all that could be desired. There was a good iron bed, an excellent mattress, a dresser ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... 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 whittling ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... represented the fantastic figure of a man gesticulating in front of a ship, from which he appeared to have just stepped. My publisher told me it was meant for Hamlet, and I immediately reflected that this character had been selected as a concrete example of the pessimistic tendency. I may add that, on awaking, I was distinctly aware of having felt puzzled when dreaming, and of having striven to read a ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... slightest appreciation of the spiritual power of Judaism or of the divine purpose illustrating itself in the rise and fall of nations. His conception of history is a biography of might, tempered by occasional manifestations of divine retribution. The concrete event is the important thing, and of culture and literature he says scarcely a word. His occasional moral reflections are on a mediocre plane and not true to the finer spirit of Judaism. He is consciously ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... iii. 4.] The idea of elevating an abstraction into a great first cause is certainly puerile, nor is it easy to understand his meaning, other than that the abstract has a higher significance than the concrete. The speculations of Thales tended toward discovering the material constitution of the universe, upon an induction from observed facts, and thus made water to be the origin of all things. Anaximander, accustomed to view things in the abstract, could ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... time looking at the picture, thinking. Here was the concrete, visible presentment of something that drew her strongly. She found an atlas, and looked up Cariboo Meadows on the map. It was not to be found, and Hazel judged it to be a purely local name. But the letter told her that she would have to stage it a hundred and ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the first time in her life her errant dreams took concrete shape. At last she began to feel the companionship of a particular man necessary for her happiness. She had never before realised the pleasure, the joy, to be derived from the presence of one of the opposite sex who was in sympathy, in perfect ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... His sayings and phrases are 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 ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... the greatest religious poet we have ever had, Browning has never written anything in the ordinary style of religious verse, the style of Herbert, of Keble, of the hymn-writers. The spirit which runs through all his work is more often felt as an influence than manifested in any concrete and separate form. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, La Saisiaz and Ferishtah's Fancies are the only prominent exceptions to ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... secured "under the beneficent despotism" of the Crown Colony system. However, let the above vague hyperboles be submitted to the test of practical experience, and the abstract government analysed in its concrete relations with ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... fully revealed. The 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 ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath

... certain interest in their needs and affairs. His practical knowledge was enormous. I think I have told you of the completeness of his arrangements—everything had been foreseen from grindstones to gas nippers. The same quality of concrete speculation showed him what we lacked in our ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the wall and the two landward gates seems to be indicated by the old ward boundaries, but modern investigators have neglected them. There was another Roman settlement, namely, at Westminster, where the abbey stands on the site of some older buildings. Roman concrete forms the foundation of the older part of the church and the dark cloisters. The pavement of a dwelling was found under the nave, and a sarcophagus, bearing a rudely carved cross, showed that the town was not walled. The Romans possibly built here on account of the ford, and we may ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... popular speakers, and altogether purifying and ennobling his mind. This Anaxagoras was called Nous, or Intelligence, by the men of that day, either because they admired his own intellect, or because he taught that an abstract intelligence is to be traced in all the concrete forms of matter, and that to this, and not to chance, the universe owes ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... the city's quarter once given over to the Spaniard. Here were still his forbidding abodes of concrete and adobe, standing cold and indomitable against the century. From the murky fissure, the eye saw, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of his Moorish balconies. Through stone archways breaths of dead, vault-chilled air coughed upon him; his feet struck jingling iron rings in staples ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... worked like real bankers And claimed "three days of grace;" Then we figured "hare and greyhound" In their leaping, jaunty race; We desired an illustration Of the problems to be solved, As no concrete computation From the ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... does not produce 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 strongly in Childe Roland for pure ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... also arises from the fact that many do not clearly enough draw the distinction between Pedagogics as a science and Pedagogics as an art. As a science it busies itself with developing a priori the idea of Education in the universality and necessity of that idea, but as an art it is the concrete individualizing of this abstract idea in any given case. And in any such given case, the peculiarities of the person who is to be educated and all the previously existing circumstances necessitate a modification of the universal aims and ends, which modification ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... Man found it necessary to have a name is interesting, because it shows how early the solidarity and psychological actuality of the tribe was recognized; and as to the selection of a name from some animal or concrete object of Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason that there was nothing else for the savage to choose from. Plainly to call his tribe "The Wayfarers" or "The Pioneers" or the "Pacifists" or the "Invincibles," or by any of the thousand and one names which ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... best known as the master of the Novelle, was born in Zrich, July 19, 1819, as the son of a master turner. A love for the concrete world of reality induced him to take up painting. Keller was not without talent in this line, but achieving no signal success, he gave up painting for letters. To secure for himself a stable footing in the civic world, Keller, after a number ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various

... and goes on with the excavation. After he's blasted out a hole big enough for a terminal tunnel he jabs in a hunk of cotton soaked with sulphuric acid, and then tamps down the concrete. ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... from Mons and its neighbourhood. They were lying about the fields in all directions, and blocking the roads with carts and vans in which they were trying to carry off as much of their worldly goods as possible. The whole country-side showed those concrete evidences of disturbance and alarm which brought home to all our minds what this retreat meant and all that it might ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres

... the Vindictive, 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 of the defenders and make it easier to ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... very little value. These ships, like those used in the first attempt, were loaded with stones and scrap iron consolidated into a mass by pouring liquid cement over it, thus converting it into a sort of reinforced concrete, underneath which was buried the explosion charges destined to blow out the bottoms of the ships and sink them upon their arrival at their ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood

... piece houses of concrete," says The National News, "are now quite common in America." The only complaint, it appears, is that some of them are just a trifle tight under ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various

... a single man, but a type; the concrete illustration of a vague ideal he had long known. He realized as the others did not, that the speaker was merely practising on them—training, as the man himself would have said. When Landers was critically conscious, he ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... efforts towards proselyting the rich, Gloria had not neglected her immediate family. By arguments and by bringing to the fore concrete examples to illustrate them, she had succeeded in awakening within her father a curious and unhappy frame of mind. That shifting and illusive thing we call conscience was beginning to assert itself in ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... 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, for instance—my own experience would have seemed less ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... creosote, however, possesses the most penetrating powers of any. The method of filling the cavities depends to a great extent on their size and form. Very large cavities with great openings are generally bricked on the outside, over the opening, and filled on the inside with concrete, the brick serving the purpose of a retaining wall to hold the concrete in place. Concrete used for the main filling is usually made in the proportion of one part good Portland cement, two parts sand, and four parts ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey

... and unifies the landscape of the whole town and puts all the community centers where they belong. The Town and Settlement straggled a bit before, but the chapel and the school will unite them! Braid says the schoolhouse can be built of weathered stone and concrete and finished by September fifth, in time to start school. Wilkerson can begin immediately putting out his hedges and the Reverend Gregory is down there now finishing laying out the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... brought back to concrete reasons, he declared that his daughter's dowry had increased, very much increased, through wise investments of his own. The girl had a good home—better than she would have at Burslem. The man who married her must better ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... 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 ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland

... the department that one of the maintenance crew, Ramon Lopez, had been killed. A forty-foot ladder broke while atop it Lopez was hosing down a pothead, and he was driven backward into the concrete pavement ...
— New Apples in the Garden • Kris Ottman Neville

... was monstrously alive, monstrously vigorous; at times over-strong and over-vital, exaggerative of nature, but never really unnatural, and he never once overreached himself in an effort. No matter how enormous the conception might be, he never lacked the means of carrying it to the concrete. No giantism of limb and feature was beyond the ability of his brush; no astounding foreshortening was too much for his unerring point; no vast perspective was too deep for his knowledge and strength. His production was limited only by the length of his life. Great genius means before ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... as a packet of seed. In reality it is not nearly so much trouble as it sounds, and then, too, this is for the first season only, a well built frame lasting for years—forever, if you want to take a little more time and make it of concrete instead of boards. ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering over each other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only "look ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... him upon his means of carrying on his expenditure. His answer was to refer to the pavement of the city of London. By paving here and there he had, he informed me, made a concrete for the wheels to roll on. He calculated that he now had credit for the space of three new years—ample time for him to fight his fight ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... seized on the Idea and purged it of what is trivial or accidental, reclothes it in a concrete dress and so represents it to us. And you will generally remark in the very greatest poets that not only are the images they represent to us extraordinarily definite and concrete and therefore vivid—as Dante, for example, will describe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... being misunderstood in the way in which they have been misunderstood by both the vernacular translators. Indeed, K.P. Singha blunders ridiculously, while the Burdwan translator limits them to only the use of food, supposing the commentator's concrete examples exhaust ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... wonderfully on the slack and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh—and Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain. He did go on for a time honestly entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete one within it. In some unimaginable way he could suppose that the one by some miracle of ennoblement—and neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German, the American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of mankind ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... Europe, and spent his holiday in a frugal walking-tour through Brittany. When he came back he seemed refreshed by his respite from business cares and from the interminable revision of his cherished scheme; while contact with the concrete manifestations of beauty had, as usual, ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rain suggested—and from which broader conceptions proceeded ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... into his "light sketches of sea and olive groves and the various sunlit aspects of Greek life,"[3] continues to broaden his vision and art through an unquenchable eagerness for knowledge, for an understanding of things beautiful, whether present or past, concrete or abstract. He makes broad strides from his Hymn to Athena, to The Eyes of My Soul, Iambs and Anapests, and The Grave. In all "the pathetic and the common meet inseparably with an art exact and full of grace, an art that knows its purpose."[4] But in Life ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas

... 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 and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... was another presence in the room beside her own; she had had a half-conscious vision in the moment of waking of a shadowy something that had seemed to fade away by the window. As the actual reality of this thought pierced through the sleep that dulled her brain and became a concrete suggestion, she sprang out of the bed and ran on to the balcony. It was empty. She leaned over the railing, listening intently, but she could see nothing and hear nothing. Puzzled, she went back into her room and turned on the lights. Nothing seemed to be missing: her watch lay ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... 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 Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity of the "Ossianite" press, it ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... miscellaneous work, mostly of the compilation order, the play of the Good-natured Man began to assume concrete form; insomuch that Johnson, always the friend of this erratic Irishman, had promised to write a Prologue for it. It is with regard to this Prologue that Boswell tells a foolish and untrustworthy story about Goldsmith. Dr. Johnson had recently been honoured by an interview with ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black

... to keep the Committee informed of the amount of cement used, of fresh piles driven, of water pumped out, of concrete put in, to notify casualties, as they occurred, in a manner that might suggest the Committee's obligations under employers' liability, but did not harrow their feelings; to be at the works by nine o'clock ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various

... was forgotten and remained unknown until portions of its foundations were discovered in 1889, during the underpinning, preparatory to restoration, of the present west front.[1] Beneath this front, but only for a little way within it, the older foundations extended. They were of hard concrete, from 4 to 5 feet deep and wide, and still carried fragments of the walls, about 2 feet 4 inches wide, of tufa, sarsen, and Roman brick. These remains, on examination, proved to have belonged to the east end of a building, which, in this direction, terminated in an apse that occupied almost ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer

... conquests of the last decade might have been lost, had not the First Consul, to use his own expressive phrase, "thrown in some blocks of granite." We may intensify his metaphor and assert that out of the shifting shingle of French life he constructed a concrete breakwater, in which his own will acted as the binding cement, defying the storms of revolutionary or royalist passion which had swept the incoherent atoms to and fro, and had carried desolation far inland. Thenceforth France was able to work out her future under the shelter of institutions ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... living two in a room may obtain room and board in boarding houses in Manila at a rate as low as $35 per month each. In the Young Men's Christian Association building, a large reenforced concrete structure with reading room, gymnasium, and a good restaurant, the charge for two in a room is $10.25 each. Board costs $27.50, a total of $37.75. The expenses for clothing in Manila are less than in the United States, as white clothing is worn the whole year and white duck suits may be obtained ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... 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 hot water may ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... developing also in Great Britain, and it will continue to develop as its value becomes more and more understood. It is a curious fact that Socialists, though they recommend co-operation in the abstract, oppose it in the concrete for similar reasons. They fear that satisfied and prosperous co-operators ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling

... idea then—nor had Celia—how much inconvenience and embarrassment can be produced by a warm-hearted parlour-maid. Jillings' devotion did not express itself in a concrete form until Celia's birthday, and the form it took was that of an obese and unimaginably hideous pincushion which mysteriously appeared on her dressing-table. Old and attached servants are in the habit of presenting their employers on certain occasions with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various

... character of the land that we have found now encompassing this sea. Why, if the new land is a fragment of the old—why does it not retain its old formation? What has become of the granite and the calcareous deposits? How is it that these should all be changed into a mineral concrete with which ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... and jumping high in the air at every other step, Astro raced out of the gigantic maintenance hangar at the Venusport spaceport and charged at his two unit mates waiting on the concrete apron. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... the words. He had been prepared to hear of a vast repose, and yet these concrete ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... wider the sphere of its activity, the more boldly imaginative it becomes. A faculty so subtle and so sympathetic must needs play a vitally important role, not only when its possessor is studying "subjects" or handling concrete problems, but also, and more especially, when he is dealing with the "affairs of life"; and we can understand that when it is wholly or largely lacking, each of the special faculties which specialising is supposed to foster will suffer from not being tempered ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... out. We've bought a big tract of swamp, and we're filling it in and clearing it, and we're going to lay out a shipyard there and turn out ships—standardized ships—as fast as we can. We're steadying the ground first, sinking concrete piles in steel casing—if you put 'em end to end, they'd reach twenty-five miles. They're just to hold the ground together. That's what the whole country has got to do before it can really begin to begin—put some solid ground under its feet. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... The relics may all be false, but the fact that they were venerated some 250 years after his death shows that the people of India thought of him not as an ancient semi-divine figure like Rama or Krishna but as something human and concrete. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... poems of Mr. Rudyard Kipling have all the spirit and swing of their predecessors. Patriotism is the solid concrete foundation on which Mr. Kipling has built ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow

... her back through the gloom to his sitting-room. There was a strange, fierce light in his bright blue eyes, which the child-woman did not see, and which, if she had perceived, she would not have understood any more than he understood it himself—for no concrete thought had yet come to him about the future. Only, there underneath was that mighty force, relentless, inexorable, of heredity, causing the instinct which had dominated the Arranstouns for eleven ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn

... the first suggestion for a union of all the colonies. In 1734 a council was held at Albany at the instance of the Crown to provide the means for the defence against France in Canada, and it was then that Franklin submitted the first concrete form for a union of the colonies into a permanent alliance. It was in advance of the times, for, conservative as it was, it was unfortunately opposed both by the ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... proud to die, Unask'd smile pardon upon vanity, Nay, praise it, when themselves are praised thereby.' 'Ill-match'd I am for a God's blandishments! So great, so wise—' 'Gods, in the abstract, are, no doubt, most wise; But, in the concrete, Girl, they're mysteries! He's not with thee, At all less wise nor more Than human Lover is with her he deigns to adore. He finds a fair capacity, And fills it with himself, and glad would die For that sole She.' 'Know'st ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... chatter of politicians and the bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last arrived when man, all over this planet, is entering upon a new career of moral, intellectual, and political emancipation; and America is the concrete expression and theatre of that great fact, as all spiritual truths find their fitting and representative physical incarnation. But what would this huge western continent be, if America—the real America of the mind—had ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... that has almost caught him, so the trapline was possessed now of a new thrill for Miki. Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger. And he welcomed it. His wits were sharpened. The fascination of the trapline was deadlier ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood

... farther than being thought of, or possibly seeing daylight as an "esquisse" - but seldom any farther than that. The Burnham plan for San Francisco was such an unrealized dream, but here the dream has achieved concrete form. The buildings as a group have all the big essential qualities that art possesses only in its noblest expression. Symmetry, balance, and harmony work together for a wonderful expression of unity, of oneness, that buildings devoted to profane ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus

... it competently, its harmoniously disposed wide panels, the shapely fan-light over it, the small panes of greenish old glass on each side. "Beautiful old bits you get occasionally in these out-of-the-way holes," he remarked. But the older man was aware of nothing so concrete and material. He saw the door as he saw everything else that day, through a haze. Chiefly he was concerned as to what lay behind the door. . . . "My neighbors," he thought, "the first I ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... well known, the Truckee River is the only outlet to Lake Tahoe. This outlet is on the northwest side of the Lake, between Tahoe City and Tahoe Tavern, and is now entirely controlled by the concrete dam and head-gates referred to in the chapter on "Public uses of the Water ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... sick and tired of plutocrats who struggle and scheme but for themselves; we turn with loathing from the concrete selfishness of Newport and Saratoga; the clatter of arms and the blare of battle-trumpets in time of peace are hideous to our ears—we want no wealth ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... the time comes, you just remember my little fortune-telling stunt. But before we shake hands, let's get back to concrete things for a minute or two. How are you fixed for the present, and what are you going ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... 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 not ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton

... fully occupied and rather more 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 ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... expressed in abstract form, are the universal determinants of the nature of the objective and of the character of the action to attain it. Their further resolution into factors of more concrete form is indicated hereinafter (see Chapter VI, in the discussion of Section II ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College

... he turned and strode down the hillside to the dam site in the canyon. The time had come to shut his hand about the work and let his hold be felt. He located the superintendent directing the pouring of concrete in the frames of the dam core, Atkinson, a man of fifty with a stubby gray mustache, a wind-bitten face and a tall angular frame. When Weir joined him he was observing with speculative eyes the indolent movements of a group of ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... ideals are vague and abstract, so too are the expressions of his Weltschmerz. It needs no concrete idea to arouse his enthusiasm to its highest pitch. Thus Hyperion exclaims: "Der Gott in uns, dem die Unendlichkeit zur Bahn sich oeffnet, soll stehen und harren, bis der Wurm ihm aus dem Wege geht? Nein! nein! ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... thus with the limited or special interest of each group, may evolve in his own mind the plan which most naturally will lead the boys not only into a wider field of concrete facts, but also into the habit of seeing relationships, of drawing conclusions and of ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... built himself, employing the men and buying all the materials, with the assistance of a young clerk of works; but though the enterprise was a source of great pleasure, it was a constant worry. He also designed and built a concrete garden wall, with which he was very pleased, though it cost considerably more than he anticipated. He had not been at Parkstone long before he set about the planning of "alterations" with his usual enthusiasm. We were both away from ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... natural freshwater resources: large concrete or natural rock water catchments collect rainwater (no longer used for drinking water) and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... to laa it into th' owd Pope good tidily." Another time my father said something to him about the Emperor of Russia. "Rooshur," said Tom; "what's that him yeou call Prooshur?" And yet again, when a concrete wall was built on to a neighbouring farm-building, Tom remarked contemptuously that he "din't think much of them consecrated walls." Withal, what an honest, ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome

... place; cf. 24 quomodo primum for pr. quom. Ille equus est: Cic. seems to consider that the [Greek: axioma], which affirms the existence of an abstract quality, is prior to that which affirms the existence of a concrete individual. I can quote no parallel to this from the Greek texts. Expletam comprehensionem: full knowledge. Here we rise to a definition. This one often appears in Sextus: e.g. Adv. Math. VII. [Greek: ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... 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, as I showed above, to conclude from this that ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... the nation. The work of restoration is being carried out by the Office of Works, and the Society of Antiquaries are, at their own expense, sifting every cubic inch of ground under those stones that are being re-erected—to the dismay of many of that body—in beds of concrete! Much apprehension has been felt by archaeologists that this renovation will have deplorable results, but it is promised that nothing is to be done in the way of replacement which cannot be authenticated. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... the word the sixteen oars dashed simultaneously into the water. The Oxonians were the first to show a lead, and at the Creek ["Creek" scratched out and nothing substituted] were a foot to the good. The Craydle is a pleasing river with banks running up from the sea to slopes up the Concrete Wall this advantage was fully maintained ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed

... is a sky-scraper? It is a giant bird-cage, whose interstices are filled with stone or concrete. Though its structure is concealed from the eye, it is impossible not to wonder at its superb effrontery. It depends for its effect, not upon ornament, which perforce appears trivial and inapposite, but upon its mass. Whatever approaches ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... city wall a broad concrete walk; along this walk seats, trees, and rude statues; and between the walk and the ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George

... happiness. And Jefferson did not flinch, as did many of his associates, from giving that right a full and general application to blacks as well as whites. Nor was he a mere doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He described what he had seen. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... 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

... the extraordinary appearance of the sovereign whose features they were called on to portray, and the novelty of several of the subjects which they had to treat. That artist among them who first gave concrete form to the ideas circulated by the priests of Atonu, and drew the model cartoons, evidently possessed a master-hand, and was endowed with undeniable originality and power. No other Egyptian draughtsman ever expressed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... 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 narrow entrance. "There's ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... by its absolute emptiness of content, does not afford any means in itself of progression; somehow and somewhere a principle of movement, of development, of concrete reality, must be found or assumed, to link this ultimate abstraction of existence to the multifarious phenomena {12} of existence as known. And it was, perhaps, because Anaximander failed to work out this aspect ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... in West Africa is that fair play is unknown to it. The negroes may thoroughly identify themselves with England, claim a share in her greatness, and display abundant lip-loyalty; yet there is the racial aversion to Englishmen in the concrete, and to this is added the natural jealousy of seeing strangers monopolise the best appointments. The Sa Leonite openly declares that he and his can rule the land much better and more economically than the sickly foreigner, who spends half his service-time on board the steamers ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... day and evening in transcribing words into my "Ojibwa Vocabulary." This is a labor requiring great caution. The language is so concrete, that often, when I have supposed a word had been dissected and traced to its root, subsequent attention has proved it to be a compound. Thus verbs have been inserted with pronouns, or with particles, indicating negation, or the past or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... course, well enough by now in an abstract way what the Religious discipline would mean, but he wished to have it made more concrete by examples, and he sat long with the chaplain asking him questions. Mr. Carleton had been, as he said, in the novitiate at Canterbury for a few months, and was able to tell him a good deal about the life there; but the differences between the Augustinians and the Cluniacs ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... toward the control tower of the field. Joe looked around. The transport ship seemed very large, standing on the concrete apron with its tricycle landing gear let down. It curiously resembled a misshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate supporting legs. Its fuselage, in particular, did not look right for an aircraft. The top of the cargo section went smoothly back to the ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... advantages. On this side, again, full liberty implies full equality. Turning to the internal side, the spirit of religious liberty rests on the conception that a man's religion ranks with his own innermost thought and feelings. It is the most concrete expression of his personal attitude to life, to his kind, to the world, to his own origin and destiny. There is no real religion that is not thus drenched in personality; and the more religion is recognized for spiritual ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... this life without the slightest glimmering of what domestic content might be theirs. Surely the word "home" for the artisan should signify something more than a place where he is badly fed. Still, it is a solemn fact that no more concrete definition of the word has ever been forthcoming. Now, such a state of affairs cannot be excused on the score of expense, for the crowning triumph of good Cookery is its ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)

... I wandered over the vessel. It was reassuringly solid and concrete. And yet there was ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson

... illimitable fry turned over and well done,—a fry ever doing and never done, which should simmer and fizzle on eternally down the ages. An abstract fry—let me here record it—suits me passing well; yet I like not the concrete and personal broil. I trip gayly to a feast, prepared to eat, but not, as in the supper of Polonius, to be eaten. I have very little of the martyr-stuff about me. It is well, it is glorious, to read of those fine things; but does any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... 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 chafe and glow in you. I want you to dig into this commonplace, this ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... that Tom would have liked to make, it was a trip North. It was something he had long contemplated in the abstract, but had never been able to muster up sufficient courage to attempt in the concrete. He was prudent enough, ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... half-hour he, Soames, would go down to hell; and after that half-hour all bearers of the Forsyte name would feel the bloom was off the rose. He had no illusions like Shakespeare that roses by any other name would smell as sweet. The name was a possession, a concrete, unstained piece of property, the value of which would be reduced some twenty per cent. at least. Unless it were Roger, who had once refused to stand for Parliament, and—oh, irony!—Jolyon, hung on the line, there had never been a distinguished Forsyte. But that very lack of distinction ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... a central path of four feet, and a bed of four feet on each side. An earth or tile floor and a slate or stone shelf will, with one four-inch flow and return pipe, complete the arrangements. The less wood and the less concrete the better; there is nothing like porous red tiles for the floor and stone for the shelves, with loose planks on edge to keep up the soil, a few uprights being sufficient to hold ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... are the largest and widest, being forty to fifty feet high, and, tapering slightly from the base, about forty feet wide at the top. They are constructed upon a solid foundation of stone masonry resting upon concrete, while the walls themselves are built of a solid core of earth, faced with massive brick: the top is paved with tiles, and defended by a crenelated parapet. Bastions, some of which are fifty feet square, are built ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... wishes, but cleared in a manner which must haunt her to her own dying day, was enough to turn a brain already heated with contending emotions. Fancies took the place of facts, and by the time she reached this house had so woven themselves into a concrete form that no word she now utters can be relied on. This is how I see it, Mr. Hammersmith, and it is on this ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... 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 come ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... tints; his pen is dipped in no colours but light and darkness. For the eye of infinite wisdom there is no need of shading. All things, all thoughts, all emotions, all experiences, all doubts and hopes and fears, all intentions, all wishes seen down to the lower strata of their concrete and multitudinous elements, are ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... was grateful that he had not seen her in her hours of supreme degradation. If he ever saw Masters again he would tell him of her downfall, of course—and the reason for it; but at least he could paint no horrible concrete picture. For the first time she felt thankful that she had not sunk lower; been compelled, indeed, against her will, to retrace her steps. She even regretted the hideous episode of the ferry boat, although she had welcomed the exposure at the time. Her pride ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... he is probably feverish and cross. If he keeps still he is going to sleep and not paying attention. If he gets up or sits down it is noted as indicative of how he is going to decide the case. Every movement is watched. The position of a judge is not enviable. He is the concrete object to which the evils of the court-room attach. To the popular mind he is the court, the law, the method of procedure, the source of all the technicalities, and the delays. The beaten side will bear him a grudge, and the ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells



Words linked to "Concrete" :   building material, sand, paving material, concretion, reinforced concrete, concreteness, ferroconcrete, real, tangible, concrete representation, solidify, concrete jungle



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com