Lipinski Concrete Quotes

In the non-material scenario, both temple or total quality gets raised, deploying communication as mortar, culture as reinforcement, and commitment as concrete. ~ Priyavrat Thareja

An individual is a complex, indefinable object. And so only the individual possesses something that can without lying be called existence. As the Cynic philosophers already knew, nothing real, nothing concrete is definable.

The necessities of thought, speech, of science and action force us to act as if the definable exists. Let us consent to this, while all the while smiling at the inevitable.

But we should never forget that no word can give us the essence of a being, not even my own essence, and that no thought, whatever good will and sympathy might animate it, will ever penetrate the essence of another. Our most beautiful, strongest, most penetrating truths glory - modestly - in being but lesser lies.

The more I strive to seize the concrete, the more my formulas become complex and hesitant, then the more I become irritated at not being able to make them flexible and mobile. Whenever I pronounce absolute words I know I am speaking in the abstract and that I am speaking of the void. ~ Han Ryner

In any case, when I imagine baptism as the next concrete act toward my entry into the Church, no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need - and I think I can say the vocation - to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same 'color' as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are. ~ Simone Weil

Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss ... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete
and these are substances not easily impressed. ~ Robert Macfarlane

The hands have to be like concrete when the horse resists and like butter when he yields. ~ Nuno Oliveira

Every spiritual action manifests itself in the physical world by bringing concrete changes ~ Sunday Adelaja

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures. ~ Henri Poincare

Churchill strikes a note in my life because my father worked on Mulberry Harbour, which was the code name for the temporary concrete harbours which were towed across the Channel to make the D-day landings in France possible. ~ Ridley Scott

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. ~ Penelope Lively

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

He wished summer was over. At least when he was at Aglionby he could turn over his papers to see his grades, concrete proof of his success at something. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Some minds are like concrete - all mixed up and permanently set. ~ Sergio Aragones

In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love. ~ Pope Francis

I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk. ~ Tift Merritt

Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark," Carver said. "He's gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case." "In case of what?" Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself. "Well . . . body gases," Carver said. "The ground was a little wet, you wouldn't want him popping up. ~ John Sandford

I think that everyone who is going to really move up has got to go through some trauma ... I'm much more respected in my new job, than I was as the head of the Warner Group, because I survived being thrown out the window, going splat on the concrete, and walking ... ~ Doug Morris

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. ~ Bill Cosby

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

This is the thing about a lie: over time, it not only obscures the truth but consumes it. Those who pursue veracity (those dogooders, those seekers) see truth not as an abstract thing but something concrete. Strong, vivid, with an unassailable right to prevail. But those who fight for it, who fight in the name of it, do not understand that truth is anemic, weak. Especially in the hands of an accomplished liar. Especially over years. A lie, in collusion with time, can overpower the truth. A good lie has the power to subsume reality. A good lie can become the truth. ~ T. Greenwood

She took two more steps forward. "Tristan!" she cried out loud. "Are you there?"
She walked to the edge of the board and stood with her toes at the very edge. "Tristan, where are you?" Her voice echoed back from the concrete walls. "I love you!" she cried. "I love you! ~ Elizabeth Chandler

This is thought to be Jesus's best-loved parable, usually because our eyes are on the prodigal and his father. But as with jokes, so with parables: there is a principle in both of "end stress." The "punch line" comes at the end. That being the case the alarming message here is that the spirit of the elder brother, the legalist, is more likely to be found near the father's house than in the pig farm - or in concrete terms, in the congregation and among the faithful. And sometimes (only sometimes?), it appears in the pulpit and in the heart of the pastor. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete. ~ Glen Cook

I'd been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I've been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City's got a few, and Chicago's got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn't give them a lot of options. The details are different - some of 'em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling. ~ Ben H. Winters

A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses ... : this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wiresto the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ. ~ Jean Baudrillard

No trees in sight, just concrete
Still I see
Two roads twist and turn in front of me
No signs, but screams
Which way's reality?
So you choose; yeah, you choose
Maybe you lose
The sidewalk paved in hitches
Broken hearts not fixed by stitches
But morning's coming soon
No right in sight, just questions
And you find
There is no map to Mecca
It's just life
No right answer; perfect marks
It's no big deal; it's just your heart
Falling stars and lightning sparks
This will only sting a bit
We are all just
Magnets for fate
Stumbling, skipping, running at our pace
Making choices, losing voices
Making wishes for forgiveness
But morning's coming soon

And no matter where you sit, how fast you sip
The coffee tastes the same on magnet lips

"Magnets for Fate"
-Electric Freakshow ~ Cat Patrick

Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging. ~ Peter Kreeft

Lost

In black as solid as a mire
In a land no one would die for
In a time I was lost
To anyone who ever loved me
The world set itself on fire
And the sky collapsed above me

In a place no one could call home
In a place I breathed and slept
In a battle no one understood
That continued all the same
I sat defenseless and alone
With the insignificance of my name

In the midst of the Lord's birth
On a night meant to be peaceful
In a country of the Prophet
Where women don't live free
I spoke to God from the shaking Earth
And prayed my mother would forgive me

In a city without power
In a desert torn by religion
In a bank between two rivers
We added up the decade's cost
And glorified the final hour
Of a war that everyone had lost

In the dust of helplessness
In a concrete bunker
In a fate I chose myself
I waited without remorse
To fight again as recompense
For wasted lives and discourse

-an original poem about an attack on our base in Iraq during the Arab Spring ~ Dianna Skowera

It's been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet
it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. I think about how to do it, you know. How to kill them. All kinds of elaborate things, like trapping them in pits and burying them alive, or covering them with concrete. ~ Rachel Caine

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

Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves. ~ Martin Seligman

New York is a nice place." "If you like concrete, crowds, and that claustrophobic, closed-in feeling. ~ Janette Rallison

The prose-poems of the Japji envelop us by opening our third eye to the experience of concrete manifestations of nature, the overall circle of light, which shone in the nimbus, which people saw around Nanak's face, lit up by the shimmering glow of the flame which burnt inside him. It ~ Khushwant Singh

But Hitler is not tranquil. His right eardrum was ruptured in the bomb blast during the assassination attempt and has only recently stopped bleeding. That same blast hurled him to a concrete floor, bruising his buttocks "as blue as a baboon's behind" and filling his legs with wooden splinters as it ripped his black uniform pants to shreds. However, ~ Bill O'Reilly

Churches are the primary partners that work with Habitat in an almost infinite variety of creative overlapping circles. We cherish these partnerships with churches ... I have always seen Habitat for Humanity as a servant of the church and as a vehicle through which the church and its people can express their love, faith, and servanthood to people in need in a very tangible and concrete (literally!) way. ~ Millard Fuller

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us. ~ Wendell Berry

It's like if you plant something in the concrete and if it grow and the rose petal got all kinda scratches and marks, you ain't gonna say "damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from the concrete.." you gonna be like "DAMN! a ROSE grew from the CONCRETE? ~ Tupac Shakur

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar. ~ Leigh Hunt

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest. ~ Walter Brueggemann

Art can't be compared with journalism; it can't deal with concrete issues. ~ Mona Hatoum

Violet didn't realize that she'd pressed herself so tightly against the door until it opened from the inside and she stumbled backward.
She fell awkwardly, trying to catch herself as her feet slipped and first she banged her elbow, and then her shoulder-hard-against the doorjamb. She heard her can of pepper spray hit the concrete step at her feet as she flailed to find something to grab hold of.
Her back crashed into something solid. Or rather, someone. And from behind, she felt strong, unseen arms catch her before she hit the ground. But she was too stunned to react right away.
"You think I can let you go now?" A low voice chuckled in her ear.
Violet was mortified as she glanced clumsily over her shoulder to see who had just saved her from falling.
"Rafe!" she gasped, when she realized she was face-to-face with his deep blue eyes. She jumped up, feeling unexpectedly light-headed as she shrugged out of his grip. Without thinking, and with his name still burning on her lips, she added, "Umm, thanks, I guess." And then, considering that he had just stopped her from landing flat on her butt, she gave it another try. "No…yeah, thanks, I mean."
Flustered, she bent down, trying to avoid his eyes as she grabbed the paper spray that had slipped from her fingers. She cursed herself for being so clumsy and wondered why she cared that he had been the one to catch her. Or why she cared that he was here at all.
She stood up to face him, feeling more comp ~ Kimberly Derting

As the anti-slavery community, we must together ensure that this attention is transferred into concrete action and results. ~ Kailash Satyarthi

Database schemas are notoriously volatile, extremely concrete, and highly depended on. This is one reason why the interface between OO applications and databases is so difficult to manage, and why schema updates are generally painful. ~ Robert C. Martin

...(T)he last rebels of the Tuareg uprising that had devastated the north for half a decade agreed to lay down their weapons, and the nomadic warriors surrendered thousands of Kalashnikov rifles to the government. The weapons were buried tin the concrete pedestal f a "monument of Peace" that sits on a rise on Timbuktu's outskirts- an assemblage of interlocking archways surrounded by colorful murals of Malian government soldiers and Tuareg rebels shaking hands and burning their weapons. ~ Joshua Hammer

When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing. It was after midnight but this was nothing unusual. The Rickenbacker Bridge suspended across Biscayne Bay was full of night fishermen leaning on the railings, avoiding going home to their wives. Except Hector didn't bring any fishing gear with him. He led his son, Carlito, who'd just turned three, by the hand to the concrete wall, picked him up by his waist, and held him so that the boy grinned and stretched his arms out like a bird, telling his papi he was flying, flying, and Hector said, "Si, Carlito, tienes alas, you have wings."

Then Hector pushed little Carlito up into the air, spun him around, and the boy giggled, kicking up his legs up and about, telling his father, "Higher, Papi! Higher!" before Hector took a step back and with all his might hoisted the boy as high in the sky as he'd go, told him he loved him, and threw his son over the railing into the sea. ~ Patricia Engel

Before these buildings were buildings, they were just the skeletons of them. Before they were skeletons, they were cross-beams and girders. Metal and glass and concrete. And before that, they were construction plans. Before that, architectural plans. And before that, just an idea someone had for the making of a city. ~ Nicola Yoon

A giant caterpillar, its segmented body made of severed human heads, their faces screaming, their tongues functioning as legs, rippled up a wall and began tearing out chunks of concrete where a ledge had been worn, destroying another shrine. ~ Jim Butcher

Sometimes he thinks the walls are throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is. ~ Salman Rushdie