Omission quotes
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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
-- Abraham Verghese -
The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
-- Abraham Verghese -
Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
-- Abraham Verghese -
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.
-- Aldous Huxley -
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The issue Fodor writes about is central to the psychology of perception, cognition, and action. It is the central issue for anyone who would seriously study the neurobiology of behavior: Is the mind organized horizontally or vertically or both, and what are the consequences to psychology of proceeding on one assumption or the other? This has been little analyzed and written about. Jerry Fodor has repaired that omission and had done it brilliantly.
-- Alvin Liberman -
Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.
-- Arlie Russell Hochschild -
The chess world is obligated to organize a match between the champion of the world and the winner of this Carlsbad tournament - indeed, this is a moral obligation. If the world of chess should remain deaf to its obligation, on the other hand, it would amount to an absolutely unforgivable omission, carrying with it a heavy burden of guilt.
-- Aron Nimzowitsch -
The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: I came, I saw, I conquered. Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle
-- Arthur Quinn -
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In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough.
-- Charles Schumer -
In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior.
-- Elizabeth McCracken -
Can anybody tell me why reporters, in making mention of lady speakers, always consider it to be necessary to report, fully and firstly, the dresses worn by them? When John Jones or Senator Rouser frees his mind in public, we are left in painful ignorance of the color and fit of his pants, coat, necktie and vest - and worse still, the shape of his boots. This seems to me a great omission.
-- Fanny Fern -
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt -
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Let none find fault with others; let none see the omissions and commissions of others. But let one see one's own acts, done and undone.
-- Gautama Buddha -
What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
-- George Eliot -
No artist knows everything... but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.
-- Glen Duncan -
The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values.
-- Howard Zinn -
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Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
-- Isabel Paterson -
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... ...when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.
-- Isabel Paterson -
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission.
-- Isabel Paterson -
I would rather commit a sin of commission than a sin of omission, and the evangelical community is exactly the opposite. The evangelical community would rather not do something wrong and the price they're willing to pay for not doing something wrong is they're willing to fail to do something right; they're so afraid of making a mistake. Now the reason they're afraid of making a mistake is they're cowards and our community produces cowards.
-- J.P. Moreland -
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You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.
-- Jello Biafra -
Deception by an omission of the truth is as bad as a lie.
-- Jennifer Chiaverini -
Self-conceit is a weighty quality, and will sometimes bring down the scale when there is nothing else in it. It magnifies a fault beyond proportion, and swells every omission into an outrage.
-- Jeremy Collier -
Every person in the world is by nature a slave to sin. The world, by nature, is held in sin's grip. What a shock to our complacency- that everything of us by nature belongs to sin. Our silences belong to sin, our omissions belong to sin, our talents belong to sin, our actions belong to sin. Every facet of our personalities belong to sin; it own us and dominates us. We are its servants.
-- Joel Beeke -
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The minimum could be defined as the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction. This is the quality that an object has when every component, every detail, and every junction has been reduced or condensed to the essentials. it is the result of the omission of the inessentials.
-- John Pawson -
A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.
-- Josephine Hart -
Omission is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth.
-- Julianna Baggott -
Of course, we knew that the official reports were sketchy, if not falsified. But, in terms of information theory, this is precisely where the problem lay: How were we to reconstruct reality from incomplete or false reports? It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false. On the contrary, most news is completely correct, albeit tendentiously slanded; it is just that certain information is suppressed. One can adjust for the political slanting of the news, but there is virtually no way to fill in the omissions.
-- Konrad Zuse -
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The adolescent frequently supposes that she is breaking out of the confines of her mundane, schoolgirl existence simply in order to break rules and defy authority. . . . She rids herself of the "oughts" and "musts" that convert every minor infraction into a sin of omission or commission. It certainly does not occur to her or to her family that by questioning the moral standards she erected as a child she is taking the first steps in her journey toward a firmer, more reasonable, less harsh, more ethical form of conscience.
-- Louise J. Kaplan -
Omissions are not accidents.
-- Marianne Moore -
So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.
-- Mark Twain -
The art of drawing is the art of omission.
-- Max Liebermann -
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Sins of commission are far more productive of happiness than the sins of omission.
-- Myrtle Reed -
The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.
-- Octavio Paz -
Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one's own.
-- Primo Levi -
Even Avataras, saints, and sages have to undergo the ordeal of suffering, for they take upon themselves the burden of sins of omission and commission of ordinary human beings and thereby sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity.
-- Sarada Devi -
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I am well aware that the path of the biographer is beset with pitfalls, and that, for him, suppressio veri is almost necessarily suggestio falsi - the least omission may distort the whole picture.
-- Stuart Dodgson Collingwood -
Although I am deeply grateful to a great many people, I forgo the temptation of naming them for fear that I might slight any by omission.
-- Theodore Bikel -
Three conditions are necessary for Penance: contrition, which is sorrow for sin, together with a purpose of amendment; confession of sins without any omission; and satisfaction by means of good works.
-- Thomas Aquinas -
Pardon, we beseech Thee, all our offences of omission and commission; and grant that in all our thoughts, words, and actions, we may conform to Thy known will manifested in our consciences, and in the revelations of Jesus Christ our Saviour.
-- Timothy Pickering -
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The particular sin of omission which gives ground to the evil spirits is the believer’s passivity.
-- Watchman Nee
