Concrete Quotes
A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. … I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.
William Powell
There's a joy and a pain about directing where the dreams you have are becoming concrete but the attention to detail, the need for time is such that it's overwhelming at times, and the stream of responsibility.
William Shatner
In exposition and in argument, the writer must likewise never lose his hold upon the concrete; and even when he is dealing with general principles, he must furnish particular instances of their application.
William Strunk, Jr.
Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Good web text has a lot in common with good print text. It's plain, concise, concrete and 'transparent': even on a personal site the text shouldn't draw attention to itself, only to its subject.
Crawford Kilian
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
What the world, social and political, concrete and mental, really needs is not new things, but the old things made new.
Ethel M. Dell
Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history Entwickelungsgeschichte of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.
Ernst Haeckel
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world - cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there's the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn't quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It's real but not concrete.
Elaine Equi
You need a blueprint to build a house because you need to know how far the concrete is going to be poured and you need to know how think the walls have to be.
Isaiah Washington
Though determinants and matrices received a great deal of attention in the nineteenth century and thousands of papers were written on these subjects, they do not constitute great innovations in mathematics.... Neither determinants nor matrices have influenced deeply the course of mathematics despite their utility as compact expressions and despite the suggestiveness of matrices as concrete groups for the discernment of general theorems of group theory.
Morris Kline
The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.
William Strunk, Jr.
I do think it's fascinating to see a play where everybody's sort of, in various ways, uprooted, and you see the older generation, the parents, whose faith has been something concrete that has guided them through a specific set of hurdles and circumstances.
Stephen Karam
I try to make concrete that which is abstract.
Juan Gris
The thing is, you can’t always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns.
Sarah Dessen
