Concrete Quotes - Page 27

• One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

  Vitality, Language, Speak

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• The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.

  Sam Keen

  Love, Healing, Becoming

  Sam Keen (1992). “The passionate life: stages of loving”, Harper San Francisco

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• When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-ered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Mother, Rain, Thinking

  Robinson Jeffers (1965). “Selected poems”, Vintage

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• It is time for the rest of the world to join ... in demanding that ALL the nuclear weapons states -including Israel, India and Pakistan, but above all the US and Russia - negotiate concrete steps on a definite time-table toward the global, inspected abolition of nuclear weapons.

  Daniel Ellsberg

  Russia, Israel, India And Pakistan

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• Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Life, Strong, Imagination

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• 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.

  Writing, Details, Attention

  "The Elements of Style". Book by William Strunk Jr. Chapter II: "Elementary Principles of Composition", 1918.

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• By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: 'The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself. Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.'

  Alvin Toffler

  Powerful, Moving, Men

  "Future Shock". Book by Alvin Toffler, 1970.

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• Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

  George Santayana

  Life, Art, Peace

  George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2015). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four”, p.107, MIT Press

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• When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

  Derrick Jensen

  Home, Talking, Important

  Derrick Jensen (2004). “A Language Older Than Words”, p.75, Chelsea Green Publishing

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• There is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits.

  Kenny Smith

  Truth, Self, Historical

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• The sun was hot on my skin, too bright as it bounced off the white concrete and blinded me. I felt dangerously exposed. More fiercely than I would have dreamed I was capable of, I wished for the green, protective forest of Forks . . . of home.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Home, White, Skins

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• Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

  C. S. Lewis

  Writing, Mean, People

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• I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

  Matthea Harvey

  Lines, Visuals, Written

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• If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Running, Together, Stitches

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2014). “Wintergirls”, p.27, Scholastic UK

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• Whales, like elephants, are so social and intelligent. This hurts me to think of them being transported, put in noisy airplanes, and brought to a horrible concrete pen when they're supposed to be out in the sea.

  Jane Goodall

  Hurt, Airplane, Intelligent

  Interview with Suza Scalora, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• 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

  Dream, Pain, Responsibility

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• I'm from Kansas, so there were a lot of vacant lots and open fields to tackle each other in so we could avoid tackling each other on the street. But running on the street and trying not to get taken down on the concrete, that will make you fast, that's for sure.

  Barry Sanders

  Running, Taken, Kansas

  "Barry Sanders: "Mr. 99"". Interview with Jon Robinson, www.espn.com. July 31, 2009.

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• He knew when to compromise. Yet he never compromised his principles. He was a militant. Yet a militant who knew how to plan, assess concrete situations and emerge with rational solutions to problems.

  Nelson Mandela

  Inspiring, Principles, Compromise

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• A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.

  Herb Caen

  Crazy, Odds, Concrete Jungle

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• 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

  Thinking, Play, Parent

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I was a heavy heart to carry
  My beloved was weighed down
  My arms around his neck
  My fingers laced to crown.
  I was a heavy heart to carry
  My feet dragged across ground
  And he took me to the river
  Where he slowly let me drown
  My love has concrete feet
  My love's an iron ball
  Wrapped around your ankles
  Over the waterfall

  Florence Welch

  Heart, Iron, Rivers

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• [T]he 47th proposition in Euclid might now be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and therefore if Lord Hawkesbury hates the abstract truths of science as much as he hates concrete truth in human affairs, now is his time for getting rid of the multiplication table, and passing a vote of censure upon the pretensions of the hypotenuse.

  Sydney Smith

  Hate, Science, Ease

  SYDNEY SMITH (1839). “The Works”, p.374

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• ...the century's most radical vice... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.

  Paul Johnson

  Political, Vices, Century

  Paul Johnson (1991). “Modern times: the world from the twenties to the nineties”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.

  Seth

  Believe, Visions Of The Future, People

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• If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.

  William James

  Ideas, Relation, Being True

  William James (2012). “Pragmatism”, p.29, Courier Corporation

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