Quotes about Concrete

God's mercy isn't generic. It is personal grace, situational care, and concrete help. It meets you right where you are and gives you just what you need. You

The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love.

Divine love is not humanity but neighbor, the concrete, unique individual. You can only ever love individuals, because only individuals ever exist. Classes and collections are abstract objects of thought, not concretely real things. We group people into groups, but real people are concrete individuals.

It is only within the Christian doctrine of the triune God, as we are bound to believe, that we really have a concrete universal. In God's being there are no particulars not related to the universal and there is nothing universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars.

A sacrament is an action in which the Word of God does something to us through the earthly sign. It is an action in which God gets through to us in a concrete way.

What is actually man's concern is not to fulfill himself or to actualize himself but to fulfill meaning and to realize value. And only to the extent to which he fulfills concrete and personal meaning of his own existence will he also fulfill himself. Self-fulfillment occurs by itself; not through intention but as effect.

Reality presents itself always in the form of a specific concrete situation, and since each life situation is unique, it follows that also the meaning of a situation must be unique. Therefore it would not even be possible for meanings to be transmitted through traditions. Only values— which might be defined as universal meanings— can be affected by the decay of traditions… to put it succinctly: the values are dead—long live the meanings.

Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.

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 to follow.

Repentance is not true repentance unless it is specific and intelligent. We don't sin in the abstract; we sin in concrete, particular ways. Since that is true, we need to take an honest look at our lives—both heart and behavior. Spiritual awareness is a blessing. Through it, we can experience change.

This is seen in his well-known use of the parable—which, from its origin in the Greek word paraballein, literally means to throw one thing down alongside another. Parables are not just pretty stories that are easy to remember; rather, they help us understand something difficult by comparing it to, placing it beside, something with which we are very familiar, and always something concrete, specific.

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.