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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








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"Concrete" Quotes from Famous Books



... all things were formed, as the everlasting and divine. [Footnote: Arist., Phy., 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 not accept so concrete a thing as ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... Get as many concrete details as possible. Generalities never glitter. They are useful only ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller

... "Remember the marble rakes we used to make? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered 'em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concrete sidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles from the curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake had to give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If the boy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... of ideas was rich enough in types and figures, but when these were put into concrete shape, the costume and attributes were likely to be unintelligible and unsuited to the popular taste. This, even in Italy, was often the case, and not only so during the whole period of the Renaissance, but down to a still later ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... than from those given to speculation. Was the whole decade of discussion an illustration of that striking fact which has been likened to the changing of swords in Hamlet; that the abstract minds at length yield to the inevitable or at least grow less ardent in their propaganda, while the concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily affairs, in the end demonstrate the reality of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... If she needed a concrete illustration she could point to the Tyrolese. Since the treaty of Presburg their chains had chafed their limbs to the raw; at this very moment they were again in open rebellion. The administrative reforms introduced by Maximilian of Bavaria were in reality most salutary; his determined ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... 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 and ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin

... field for speculation in the analysis of right living. It conforms to the law of cause and effect. It is positively concrete in substance. A recital of the life history of Jonathan Edwards, in comparison with that of the celebrated "Jukes" family, emphasises this assumption with a degree of positiveness that is tragic in ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... concrete illustration." said the teacher. "Take the case of England. She was beyond comparison the country of all others in the nineteenth century which had most foreign trade and commanded most foreign markets. If a large volume of foreign trade under conditions ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... doing in the prosecution of the war. Prior to our arrival there we had heard a great deal about the construction work in French ports that the Americans had undertaken, but our ideas of just what this work was, were more or less vague. At Brest we saw just what it was. We saw miles of concrete piers that had been built in record-breaking time with American skill, American speed and American thoroughness. This work was a revelation to all France, and the magnitude of the task, together with the remarkably short time in which it was completed, stamp it as one of the wonders ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood

... technical book, it does not attempt philosophy. It does not contain the solution of all girl problems. It is not a great book, it is simple and concrete. It is a record of some things about which the girls I have known have compelled me to think. I have but one request to make of those who read it—that they also think—not of the book, not of the author, but of the girls—for ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery

... entered the 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 ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing.' This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter and of ether, namely they are the outcome of this insistent habit ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... under the table, "you will find self-freezing refrigerators and self-leaving servants. All the rooms are light rooms, when you light the gas. Two of his houses overlook the Park and all of them overlook the building laws. The floors are made of concrete so that if you want to bring a horse in the parlor you can do so without kicking off the plaster in the flat below. Every room has folding doors, and when the water pipes burst ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart

... starting. For weeks beforehand the crews that had volunteered to go on this desperate adventure were carefully trained in secret. The plan was to block the mouth of the Bruges Canal, by sinking three vessels filled with concrete, while the Vindictive smashed up the batteries on the mole (long solid wharf) guarding the entrance, and an old submarine, loaded like a gigantic torpedo, blew up the supports for the bridge that connected the mole with the land. Twice the little expedition sailed and had ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... were either leaning over the partitions and watching the spectacle or sitting with drink before them at the little marble tables at the back. The gaudy, gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect. I wondered why I, a creature from the concrete world, was there. I had an insane impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and wander, wander for ever, away from the world. I was walking along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... for woman is Gy (pronounced hard, as in Guy); it forms itself into Gy-ei for the plural, but the G becomes soft in the plural like Jy-ei. They have a proverb to the effect that this difference in pronunciation is symbolical, for that the female sex is soft in the concrete, but hard to deal with in the individual. The Gy-ei are in the fullest enjoyment of all the rights of equality with males, for which certain philosophers above ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... which had been erected in the garden, and dignified by the name of laboratory. For, to the boys' great delight, a model furnace had been made, with bellows, and a supply of charcoal was always ready. There was a great cast-iron mortar fitted on a concrete stand, crucibles of various sizes, and ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn

... 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 finally ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... as the emissaries threw him on the concrete floor had tended to bring Locke back to consciousness. For a moment he lay still. Then the sound of the descending elevator attracted his attention. He gazed upward and dimly saw the slowly moving platform. In a flash he realized ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... anything 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, however, to dissemble ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... you please," and so sat down, very much as if she had been in such places frequently before, which she never had. One may be quite used to the fine, free essence of gentle living, and never in all one's life have anything to do with such solid, concrete expression of it as ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... or his enemy became assimilated with those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent, the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the life-destroying powers of water, and composite monsters ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... say that not a few mental calculators work by bulks rather than by numerals; they arrange concrete magnitudes symmetrically in rank and file like battalions, and march these about. I have one case where each number in a Form seems to bear its ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... the Baths of Caracalla reveal circular tiers of galleries for the display of manuscripts and papyri. There were 500 rooms round these baths. The great hall had a ceiling made in one span, and the roof was an early example of reinforced concrete, for it was made of concrete in which bronze bars were laid. The lead for the water-pipes was probably ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to evil, of our race. Curse upon me a sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the human race. V{ae} nobis quia peccavimus! Religion, in giving this idea concrete and dramatic form, has indeed gone back of history and beyond the limits of the world for that which is essential and immanent in our soul; this, on its part, was but an intellectual mirage; it was not mistaken as to the essentiality and permanence of the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape, magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet now ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... is the age of concrete. Taking the hint, I am selecting one concrete example of which I have intimate and personal knowledge, well aware that there are numerous others that I might cite were my acquaintance with practical nut culture more extensive than it is. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... the British had surged forward all along this line in the April battle. Their old trenches, abandoned now, ran like deep fissures through the soil. They had been pretty well blasted to pieces by the British bombardment, but a good many of their deep, concrete dugouts had survived. These were not being used by the British here, but were saved in good repair as show places, and the officers who were our guides took us down ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... world appreciates better the psychology of thought, its tremendous significance will have a concrete meaning. We are too apt to regard the thought we give utterance to as a meaningless thing, so far as its influence is concerned. The woman who harps upon her ailments, who appears at the breakfast table with ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

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

... "The hole goes into the fourth dimension. There's no other explanation. And the fourth dimension holds solider than concrete." ...
— Holes, Incorporated • L. Major Reynolds

... "To be concrete, unfortunately, I cannot do so," the Russian said. "I must speak of this lady we are both interested in—pray, try to listen to me calmly, sir, for we are here for the settling of a matter which concerns the ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... it was clean, and sweet, and wonderfully still, that rose-and-white room at Norah's! No street cars to tear at one's nerves with grinding brakes and clanging bells; no tramping of restless feet on the concrete all through the long, noisy hours; no shrieking midnight joy-riders; not one of the hundred sounds which make night hideous in the city. What bliss to lie there, hour after hour, in a delicious half-waking, half-sleeping, wholly ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... many animals, large and small, all of which fled precipitately—and she rounded a sharp bend in the stream, to be confronted with a sight which must have been strange indeed to her. Stretching across the river was—a network of rusty wire, THE REMAINS OF A REINFORCED CONCRETE BRIDGE. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... all the evidences of a cultivated and elegant wickedness; he touched a stud and the sad pipings of Tristan's shepherd filled the air. His eye wandered from one object to another. They were costly and gross and florid—but they were his. They presented in concrete form his ideals, his conceptions of beauty and desire, his idea of all that is precious in life. And now—he must leave it all like a common man. He was, he felt, a slender and delicate flame, burning ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... that the hopelessness of it had made him idealise you, and even that worried her; but when she saw you together, and it seemed—well, concrete treachery—she was furious.' ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... very common source of muscular rheumatism and is especially to be avoided. Young hogs and sows that are thin are very prone to rheumatism when given wet, draughty sleeping quarters. Houses having dirt or loose board floors are very often draughty. Concrete floors when wet and not properly bedded with straw are objectionable. Although we do not fully understand the causative factors, we can take advantage of the knowledge we have gained from practical ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... is a baddix—a regular baddix," volunteered her brother. Following a device familiar to philologists, he submitted concrete examples. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... over-interesting home, leans thoughtfully on the foot-rail of her iron bed; the dear, familiar view blurs as she gazes out beyond the dormitory room and its reminiscent treasures of program and photograph, out where the warm light brightens the concrete pillars of the museum and the arboretum with its waving tops, and makes the whole fair landscape one Field of the ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... which seeks the high quality or character for its own sake, not with reference to another. Competition is the striving for something that is sought by another at the same time. Emulation regards the abstract, competition the concrete; rivalry is the same in essential meaning with competition, but differs in the nature of the objects contested for, which, in the case of rivalry, are usually of the nobler sort and less subject to direct gaging, measurement, and rule. We speak of competition in ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... had heard Sorensen's arguments before. Sorensen didn't mind discussing his battery in the abstract, but he was awfully close-mouthed when it came to talking about it in concrete terms. He would talk about batteries-in-general, ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)

... 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 had generated such a ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... Taking to camping out of doors; Out of the shelter of steel-built sheds, Sleeping out in their concrete beds— The proud guns, The loud guns, Whose echo wakes the hills, And shakes the tiles and scatters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various

... be small the steam generated beneath and around them will balloon them to the surface of the water, where the steam will be liberated and the particles will descend; and the impalpable particles in a marine boiler, which by their subsidence upon the flues concrete into scale, are carried in the first instance to the surface of the water, so that if they be caught there and ejected from the boiler, the formation of ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... unperceived. She divined a nature unworldly, impulsive, steeped, moreover, for all its spiritual and intellectual force, which was considerable, in a kind of sensuous romance—much connected with concrete things and symbols, places, persons, emblems, or relics, any contact with which might at any time bring the color to the girl's cheeks and the tears to her eyes. Honor—personal or national—the word was to Diana like a spark to dry ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Heaven! Soon, therefore, a competing light blazed before the citadel. The entrance to 'Norland Castle, The Army's hall at Shepherd's Bush, London, was a miserable affair. Two sets of narrow steps led to two doors. It was a considerable scheme to clear the whole front, erect a flight of solid concrete steps and replace the brick wall by an iron railing, ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter

... subordinate, the organization and advance of learning. Not that the individual minds are now neglected. They are wisely guarded as the servants of the one great cause. But the real mind which the university has to train is the mind of the nation—that concrete social mind whereof we all are ministers and instruments. The daily business of the university is, therefore, first of all, the creation and the advance of learning, as the means whereby the national mind can ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... Must, where 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 ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... the great objects required—viz. smoothness, durability, and quiet. The blocks, which are shaped at such an angle that they give the most perfect mutual support, are joined to each other by oaken dowels, and laid on a hard concrete foundation, presenting a level surface, over which the impact is so equally divided, that the whole mass resists the pressure on each particular block; and yet, from being formed in panels of about a yard square, they are laid down or lifted up with far greater ease ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... Precincts, so that Mrs. Brandon had not far to go. Before she arrived there a little conversation took place between the lady of the house, Miss Stiles, Miss Dobell and Dr. Puddifoot, that her presence would most certainly have hindered. Mrs. Combermere was once described by some one as "constructed in concrete"; and that was not a bad description of her, so solid, so square and so unshakable and unbeatable was she. She wore stiff white collars like a man's, broad thick boots, short skirts and a belt at her waist. Her ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... child that is the true, effective heroine of the story, as Dr. Dawson aptly points out. "Ridiculous in the lecture room, the babe in the poem, as in the songs, is made the central point upon which the plot turns, for the unconscious child is the concrete embodiment of Nature herself, clearing away all merely intellectual theories by her silent influence." This is the explanation, then, of the appearance of the babe—symbol of the power and tenderness of Nature—in critical passages of the poem, as well as in the unsurpassably beautiful intercalary ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... as the organization of the International Council, gave concrete emphasis to the growing interest in Unitarian ideas and principles in many parts of the world. They gave the sense of a large fellowship, and kindled new enthusiasm. As interpreted by these meetings, the Unitarian name has largely ceased to be one ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... European painting. It was in what he saw that he discovered a sublime architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular. He pushed further and further towards a complete revelation of the significance of form, but he needed something concrete as a point of departure. It was because Cezanne could come at reality only through what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms. Few great artists have depended more on the model. Every picture carried ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... volatile solvent such as benzene, petroleum ether, or chloroform. The last process undoubtedly furnishes products most nearly resembling the natural floral odours, and is the only one which does not destroy the delicate fragrance of the violet and jasmine. The yield, however, is extremely small, and concrete perfumes prepared in this way are therefore ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... with a certain degree of abstraction,—that is, with an actual separation from the name of the thing possessed; and that accordingly there are, in the simple personal pronouns, (where such a distinction is most needed,) two different forms of the case; the one adapted to the concrete, and the other to the abstract construction. That form of the pronoun, however, which is equivalent in sense to the concrete and the noun, is still the possessive case, and nothing more; as, "All mine are thine, and thine are mine."—John, xvii, 10. For if we suppose this equivalence ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... all these horrible thoughts had taken concrete form in her brain, she heard the grounding of arms outside, close to the door, and Desgas' voice ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... harness factories, a lumber and planing mill, 2 private schools, 3 cobblers' establishments, 2 livery stables, 3 blacksmith shops, 2 furniture houses, 2 undertaking establishments, 2 grain elevators, a lime quarry, 3 wheelwright shops, 2 tinning establishments, a concrete construction plant, monument works, wood and coal yard, Standard Oil ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head

... my mind with his opinions on naval architecture, and informed me that he would like to be an engineer. I found him up to everything that is done in the contracting line by Messrs. Peto and Brassey—cunning in the article of concrete— mellow in the matter of iron—great on the subject of gunnery. When he spoke of pile-driving and sluice-making, he left me not a leg to stand on, and I can never sufficiently acknowledge his forbearance with me in my disabled state. While he thus discoursed, he several ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... go abroad for private reasons and must dispose of the property at once. The house, being concrete, can be seen at any time, or an abstract can be had on application to the Caretaker who is within—or should be. If not within will be found at the "King's Arms" next door. For particulars apply to Phibbs and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various

... had become her creed; to do things, not to think them; to do things, not to talk them; to do things, not to read them. No matter how lofty the thoughts, how brilliant the talk, how beautiful the literature—for her, first, last, and always, were acts, acts, acts—concrete, substantial, material acts. The greatest and happiest day of her life had been when at last she laid her bare hand upon the rough, hard stone of the house in the square and looked up at the facade, her dull-blue eyes flashing with the light that so rarely came to them, while ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... extraordinary attention to foundations. The bed-rock lies, on an average, 50 ft. below the level of the lake (in places more than a hundred). To the rock the foundations are often sunk in caissons, the buildings restingon monster columns of concrete and steel.[6] In other cases great "pads" of the same materials, resting or "floating" upon the clay, sustain and distribute the weight of the building. The small extent of the business quarter adds to the effect of its tall structures. The Auditorium (1889; cost, $3,500,000), a huge ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... there are within us powers and forces that we are making but inadequate use of, and others that we are scarcely using at all. Practical metaphysics, a more simplified and concrete psychology, well-known laws of mental and spiritual science, confirm ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... as one could fix on a concrete beginning, with Genevieve Hicks's receiving a set of white fox furs for Christmas. The furs were soft and silky and luxurious, and Genevieve might well have been excused for wearing them rather triumphantly. Missy wasn't at all envious by nature and she tried to be ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... rather than to share their evil ways. "I have been a man," he said to me, "I have had my weaknesses, but even to the present day the sight of a harlot inspires me with horror." Say little to your pupil, but choose time, place, and people; then rely on concrete examples for your teaching, and be sure ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... obliged to issue in the course of the next few days, and it is not unlikely that the law officers may decline to advise shipowners upon questions to which authoritative replies can be given only with reference to concrete cases by ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... him, il fuoco Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment—into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... over the top in a tank. He followed that trip a few days later by an aeroplane observation flight. For the greater part of an afternoon the plane cruised up and down a German sector watching the effect of big French shells on concrete defences. ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces

... fulfilment. Thenceforward the name of Nelson is enrolled among those few presented to us by History, the simple mention of which suggests, not merely a personality or a career, but a great force or a great era concrete in a single man, who is ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... it would be that way, for we already knew that German capital had been back of the chemical works. I wouldn't be much surprised if it was learned that somewhere about the place, unknown to most people, these clever Germans had long ago built a heavy concrete floor, to be used in their business; but which would make the best kind of foundation for one of those big siege guns they used to knock down the Liege ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson

... the poem makes nearest approach to purely abstract and typical existence, are always consistently presented as living individuals, exalted indeed in wisdom and power, but with hardly less definite and concrete humanity ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... vigilant and minute attention, on comprehensive knowledge of detail, on experience, and on natural gift. The feeding of men abundantly at a small price involved questions of buying, transportation and forethought, not to speak of concrete knowledge of how much such things should ideally be worth. Tools by the thousand were needed at certain places and at certain times. They must be cared for and accounted for. Horses, and their feed, equipment ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the concrete facts with which conduct has ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... water does not change, but the banks have altered from grass and reeds to concrete and stone. It was a mile or so from Barnes Bridge, in a field near Barn Elms (but who could guess where?) that the second Duke of Buckingham fought and shot Lord Shrewsbury. The Duke left behind him one of the wickedest lives of the most dissolute Courts ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... hair till we went to sleep standing; but Aunt Pen had cried wolf so long, and the doctors had all declared so stoutly that there was no wolf, that our once soft hearts had become quite hard and concrete. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... any of the other acute infections. We do not now need to enquire into the theory of how this comes about; it is a well-recognized natural phenomenon. The modern explanation is in terms of antigens and anti-bodies and is fast passing from the stage of pure biochemical hypothesis into that of concrete realization. Persons who have recovered from smallpox rarely take it a second time; the few who do, have it in a mild form. It follows, then, that if smallpox is purposely inoculated into a human being he will for a long time be resistant to the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... candidates. And yet the old world wagged on in the old way. Wages and hours and working conditions could be changed, they had learned, only by coercion. This coercion could be applied, in general reforms, only by society, by stress of public opinion. But in concrete cases, in their own personal environment, the coercion had to be first applied by themselves. They had learned the lesson of letting the world in general go its way while they attended to their ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... plays are Mr. Galsworthy's Strife and Justice. The French plays, in my judgment, suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme—that is to say, the abstract element—over the human and concrete factors in the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art eludes this danger, at any rate in Strife. We do not remember until all is over that his characters represent classes, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... finished the daily tasks by means of which he earned a subsistence, or, more usually, as a member of a leisure class that was exempt from the necessity of labor, the man dominated by strong creative impulses sought to embody, in some concrete form, the desires which he felt springing up within him, and which could not be satisfied by physical activity. He turned, therefore, to drawing, to painting, to ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... more readers and a greater following, although he, of course, expresses only the aspirations of the Pan-Germans. But he presents concrete positions which ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... of Gayeties and Gravities give it as their opinion that no object of sight is regarded by us as a simple disconnected form, but that—an instantaneous reflection as to its history, purpose, or associations converts it into a concrete one,—a process, they shrewdly remark, which no thinking being can prevent, and which can only be avoided by the unmeaning and stolid stare of "a goose on the common or a cow on the green." The senses and the faculties of the understanding are ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... its reforming elements. The great source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their earlier stages of education men find it very difficult to grasp anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... of himself. But, as has often been pointed out, not only in old age, but at every period of his life, there was a mystic strain in him which was only kept in check by what was the strongest instinct of his nature—the instinct that demanded the direct vision of the concrete fact as the only condition on which he could build "the pyramid ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... that there may be a considerable disparity, as to their fitness to produce Cold, betwixt parcels of Salt, that are without scruple look't upon as Sal Armoniack: Of which difference it were not perhaps very difficult to asign probable reasons from the Nature of the Ingredients of this compound Concrete, and the wayes of preparing it. But the Duration of the Cold may be conceived to depend also. Fourthly, upon the Way of putting in the Salt into the Water. For, if you cast it in all at once, the Water will sooner acquire an intense ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... in magic, in angels, in transformations; Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm, The Black Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober history-books, and Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography. But I did occasionally take note of concrete appearances, too; and some of ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... realistically as it has the three "Divine Persons," about whose "hypostatical union" human reason has for eighteen hundred years been tormenting itself in vain. The deep impression made by such concrete representations, a million times repeated, especially on childish understandings, is usually under-estimated as to its tremendous influence; to it certainly is in large measure to be attributed the fact that irrational ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... steep and precipitous, by the unceasing lash of the southern ocean. The upper surface of this country, like that of all we had passed through lately, consisted of a calcareous oolitic limestone, below which was a hard concrete substance of sand or of reddish soil, mixed with shells and pebbles; below this again, the principal portion of the cliff consisted of a very hard and coarse grey limestone, and under this a narrow belt of a whitish or cream-coloured substance, lying in horizontal strata; but ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... interpretations of the world and of the meaning and destiny of life are scrutinized as to their adequacy and concreteness. When not challenged, the point of view of common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... possessed but three or four houses. The paving would be a ten-thousand-dollar job. As a witty political speaker once said, they paved Herculaneum in the concrete and ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... carriages, but the majority of the artillerymen were ferried to the west bank, whence they marched overland to the new camp. It was at Wad Habeshi that the army was first actually marshalled as a concrete force, and forthwith took the field. Not a moment was lost by day or night in moving men and supplies onward. The little paddle steamer captured from the dervishes during the 1896 Dongola Expedition, which had been repaired and sent to Dakhala, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... limited circle—for the working class. Oh, I know what a busy agitator you are; you make speeches, you stir people up; but when some concrete instance of progress presents itself—as now, in the case of our machines—you do not want to have anything to do ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen

... the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If Marino and Cowley be ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... 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 ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... end of the hall, and found himself in a long narrow passage, lit by a single electric lamp. Hartmann closed the door carefully behind him, and came on down the corridor, his footsteps echoing loudly on the concrete floor. ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks

... through vaulted concrete corridors in the wake of the main body, and filed out into the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... disease first visited the continent, it was regarded as a humoral disease. Duhamel, who was one of the earliest to study the character of the malady, contended that the biliary sac contained the cause of the complaint; the bile assumed a concrete form, and its superabundance was the cause of disease. Barrier, one of the earliest writers on the subject, described it as a violent irregular bilious fever. Others regarded it as a mucous discharge, or a depurative; and others, as a salutary crisis, removing from ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... SHAKSPEARE can be adequate which does not express in some concrete shape the universality of his appeal. This end might be attained by erecting a cenotaph in his honour in every churchyard and cemetery in England. I admit that such a scheme would cost money and so might be contrary to the spirit of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various

... against the extension of the franchise to women," he repeated, and went on, "but my reasons for this opposition are concrete and practical rather than abstract and theoretical, and are based upon the experience I have gained from my residence in Colorado. I am also opposed to it because it is all too evident that the suffrage should be restricted ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... their good intent and had left off when their labours were half finished, which gave the building the gruesome appearance of having been half skinned. Flush with the four sides of the square was an open concrete trench, approached at intervals by flights of half a dozen stone steps ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace

... deadfall 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

... of the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith, which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley

... the average person, and the average person cannot see the importance of the scarab in the scheme of things. The opinion she formed of Mr. Peters was of his being an eccentric old gentleman, making a great to-do about nothing at all. Losses had to have a concrete value before they could impress Joan. It was beyond her to grasp that Mr. Peters would sooner have lost a diamond necklace, if he had happened to possess one, than his Cheops of ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... seeing, even in London, a few stray works of God—the sky, for example, an occasional tree, the flowers in the window-boxes. But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the works of man—iron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles. All is human and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds. All philosophies and all religions—what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognisably human, one travels comfortable ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... convenience the novels of the earliest of this group of men, Samuel Richardson, as a starting-point, we find in Pamela and Mr. Lovelace types of character that merge from the Puritanical concrete examples of virtue and vice into a psychological attempt to depict the emotion and feeling preceding every act of heroine and villain. Through every stage of the story the author still clings to the ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... the question as to the ETHICAL STANDARD. What, in the last resort, is the test, criterion, umpire, appeal, or Standard, in determining Right and Wrong? In the concrete language of Paley, "Why am I obliged to keep my word? The answer to this is the Theory of Right and Wrong, the essential part of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... dislocates more tropes, to my sorrow, than even his friend Shakespeare, whom he thinks a greater philosopher than Aristotle, and who calls the murder of an individual sleeper the murder of sleep, confounding the concrete with the abstract, and then talks of taking arms against a sea of troubles; query, a cork jacket and a flask ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... ] Architectural Draftsman [ ] Building Foreman [ ] Concrete Builder [ ] Contractor and Builder [ ] Structural Draftsman [ ] Structural Engineer [ ] Electrical Engineer [ ] Electrical Contractor [ ] Electric Wiring [ ] Electric Lighting [ ] Electric Car Running [ ] Telegraph Engineer [ ] Telephone Work [ ] Mechanical Engineer ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... settlers in Chicago, the chief doorway into Wisconsin, and giving them advice of a general character in regard to the purchase of a farm in Wisconsin. While he is not in a position to recommend the purchase of a specific piece of land, the advice is pretty concrete and definite. His one thought very properly is the welfare of the settler, and he believes that it is in the interest of Wisconsin not to get as many settlers as possible, but to get settlers who, in his own words, "stick"—in other words, who will succeed. He does not for a moment ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek

... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... (Proceedings of S.P.R., vol. xxiii. p. 118): "The refusal of modern 'enlightenment' to treat 'possession' as a hypothesis to be spoken of as even possible, in spite of the massive human tradition based on concrete experience in its favour, has always seemed to me a curious example of the power of fashion in things scientific. That the demon theory (not necessarily a devil theory) will have its innings again is to my mind absolutely certain.... One must be blind ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... and South African Negroes never really lose the primitive in them despite the claims of uplifters and sentimentalists. Actual contact is a disillusioning thing. I heard of a concrete case when I was in the Belgian Congo. A Belgian judge at a post up the Kasai River acquired an intelligent Baluba boy. All personal servants in Africa are called "boys." This particular native learned French, acquired European clothes and became ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... 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 Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... He also began to study Spanish and learned to speak not only the pure Castilian, but several of its dialects as well. History, too, began to have a great charm for him, especially in the form of the concrete anecdote. He declares in one of his early books, the "Chronique du rgne de Charles IX", that history is but a series of anecdotes and that he would have preferred the memoirs of one of Pericles' chambermaids to the "History of ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen

... write their names and nationality in the visitors' book; and then a silver-haired, soft-voiced, gentle-mannered servitor in livery led them up the grand marble staircase and through an endless suite of airy, stately rooms—rooms with floors of polished concrete, displaying elaborate patterns, with tapestried walls and frescoed ceilings, with sparse but ancient and precious articles of furniture, chandeliers of Venetian glass, Venetian mirrors, and innumerable paintings, many of ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... was not clear. He was observed by the enemy, but, in spite of heavy rifle and machine-gun fire directed at him, and the fact that the going was necessarily slow, owing to the awful state of the ground, he approached Varlet Farm then reported to be in the hands of the enemy. Entering a concrete building alone he found it occupied by a small British garrison, who were exhausted and almost without ammunition and the most of them wounded. After investigating the ground thoroughly he returned and led up three platoons of a company of this ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... Deity appreciated literature as we do, He would probably have written out the universe in some snug little volume, some miniature series, or some boundless Bodleian, instead of unfolding it through infinite space and time, as an actual, concrete, unwritten reality. Be creation a single act or an eternal process, it would have been all a thing of books. The Divine Mind would have revealed itself in a library, instead of in the universe. As for men, they would have existed only in treatises on the mammalia. There are some specimens ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... came to me now for its refreshment. On the other hand, intellectual delight in the promises of the new world, as well as sensuality, conduced to its deliberate exploration. Still, for a year, the yearning settled with true lust upon no object more concrete than youths whose only habitation ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... curiosity such as she had never felt before about anyone. She realised that this curiosity had dawned in her almost at the first moment when she saw the stranger, and had been growing ever since. One circumstance after another had increased it till now it was definite, concrete. She wondered that she did not feel ashamed of such a feeling so unusual in her, and surely unworthy, like a prying thing. Of all her old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the most sturdy, the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... here show the nature of the works, which are of a simple character. The depth of water along the principal quay, which is being constructed of solid concrete, and is connected with the shore by an iron and steel viaduct over 750 ft. in length—which is already completed—will be 19 ft. at low water and 25 ft. at high. This quay and breakwater is shown in perspective, in plan, and in section, and is of a very heavy section, as will be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... danger now. He is fallen so low this once-high man; no criminal nor traitor, how far from it; but the unhappiest of Human Solecisms: whom if abstract Justice had to pronounce upon, she might well become concrete Pity, and pronounce ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... of those countries could be made. Later, during the administration of John Quincy Adams, these manifestations of the American Government in favor of Argentine independence are met with on every page of the records of Congress. In 1818, the first discussion took place in the American Congress—a concrete discussion on the necessity of recognizing Argentine independence. Henry Clay was, as always, the leader of this discussion, following up the movements which, with extraordinary zeal, he had made at reunions, ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... to discuss a concrete type. To so intelligent a girl, a hint should be enough. He drew the telegraph-form that still lay on the table ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... fervent, purely Schilleresque, enthusiasm as Nekrasoff. And most significant of all, his positive types are not of an abstract, fantastic character, clothed in flesh and blood of the period and environment, filled with conflicting, concrete characteristics—not one of them resembles any other. He sought and found them in all classes of society; in "Russian Women" he depicts the devoted princesses in the highest circle of the social hierarchy, with absolute truth, as faithful representatives of Russian ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... 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 ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... read 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 angle a type's ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally



Words linked to "Concrete" :   building material, abstract, practical, pavement, solid, sand, paving, ferroconcrete, touchable, reinforced concrete, tangible



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