Top 100 Quotes About Omission
#1. We fixate on sins of commission: Don't do this, don't do that - and you're OK. But that is holiness by subtraction. And it's more hypocrisy than holiness! It's the sins of omission - what you would have, could have, and should have done - that break the heart of your heavenly Father.
Mark Batterson
#2. 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.
Chuck Schumer
#3. I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will
a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul ... the bloodiest of mutilations.
Jim Fergus
#4. If there are segregated plates of fruit, I suggest a four-to-one ratio of non-watermelon to watermelon. Look, they know you want it. YOU know you want it. So if you conspicuously avoid it, that's an admission right there: guilt by omission.
Baratunde R. Thurston
#5. Bad law-preaching levels some of us; Osteen's omission of the law levels none of us; biblical preaching of the law levels all of us.
Michael S. Horton
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Some oysters which Griselda had ordered, and which would seem to be beyond the reach of incompetence, we were, unfortunately, not able to sample as we had nothing in the house to open them with - an omission which was discovered only when the moment for eating them arrived.
Agatha Christie
#9. Sins of omission, Louis said.
You don't believe in sins.
I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That's a sin.
Kent Haruf
#10. A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.
Aminatta Forna
#11. The taxonomy of medical error is vast, colorful, and at times confusing. There are slips, lapses, harmless hits, and near misses; errors of omission and of commission; operator errors, system errors, accidents, complications, and bad outcomes.
Nancy Berlinger
#12. No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.
Glen Duncan
#13. He, then, that would mortify any disquieting lust: let him take care to be equally diligent in all parts of obedience, and know that every lust, every omission of duty, is burdensome to God, though only one be burdensome to him.
John Owen
#14. 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
#15. Making love - having sex - with James had been like discovering a lie of omission. She had become more aware of things because of their pronounced absence.
Delphine Dryden
#16. Yes." Brett smiled and I cringed at his omission of 'ma'am.' The word was a Southern requirement, a verbal side dish that must accompany every course. It didn't matter if the person addressed was six years old. Or twenty. Or ninety. In the South, we said 'please' and 'thank you,' 'sir,' and 'ma'am.
Alessandra Torre
#17. 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
#18. The omission of good is no less reprehensible than the commission of evil.
Plutarch
#19. Guilt/guilty The liability to be punished for a fault, a sin, an act, or an omission unless there is forgiveness or atonement; the term normally concerns an objective fact, not a subjective feeling.
Anonymous
#20. I am all for the inclusion of foreign cultures, not their omission in our media. Foreign names, brands, and inventions must be allowed to show and to compete in US publications. Today, most foreign words are still banned. And almost 7 billion people whose first language is not English are silenced.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#21. I think if you don't say something it's lying by omission. I personally think it's immoral.
Viggo Mortensen
#22. All the lies that have ever been told or ever will be told fall into three categories, or strategies: lies of commission, lies of omission, and lies of influence.
Philip Houston
#24. Without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission or commission of central banks.
Niall Ferguson
#25. Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission
Georges Perec
#26. 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
#27. Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.
Peace Pilgrim
#28. At times, God's history seems to operate on an entirely different plane than ours ... Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses' life, but it does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt (an omission that has baffled scholars ever since).
Philip Yancey
#29. 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
#30. Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.
William Osler
#31. is, in the words of The Westminster Shorter Catechism, "any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God" (Q. 14).6 Sin is mutiny, either by its omission ("want of conformity to") or its commission ("transgression of the law of God").
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
#32. Lies can be verbal or nonverbal, kindhearted or self-serving, devious or bald-faced; they can be lies of omission or lies of commission; they can be lies that undermine national security or lies that make a child feel better. And each type might involve a unique neural pathway.
Robin Marantz Henig
#34. Since mistakes of omission don't appear in the financial statements, most people don't pay attention to them. We rub our noses in mistakes of omission - as we just did.
Charlie Munger
#35. I do not like [in the new Federal Constitution] the omission of a Bill of Rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for ... protection against standing armies
Thomas Jefferson
#36. 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
#38. I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael Ondaatje
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. A personal sin may be one of commission (doing something that is prohibited) or a sin of omission (failing to do what is required of us). It may also express itself in either an act or attitude.
Thomas Nelson Publishers
#43. One of the most frequent sins of omission is the failure to get adequate rest.
James MacDonald
#44. Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses - one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment.
Joyce Carol Oates
#45. It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful.
Thomas Hardy
#46. 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
#47. As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there's no better way to mask a lie - or at least a glaring omission - than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.
Alan Bradley
#48. Not about the perversities of others, not about their sins of commission or omission, but about his own misdeeds and negligences alone should a sage be worried.
The Dharmapada
#49. Omission to do what is necessary Seals a commission to a blank of danger; And danger, like an ague, subtly taints Even then when we sit idly in the sun.
William Shakespeare
#50. Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
Mark Twain
#51. This omission of Asian Americans from history can lead to Asian American students in college internalizing the belief that they have not contributed to and are not full members of society or higher education.
Samuel D. Museus
#52. The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
Abraham Verghese
#53. Error of omission begets new rules.
Toba Beta
#54. But the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.
Marcel Proust
#55. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness. As a boy, I could not have put
Dean Koontz
#56. He wasn't yours to get hurt by. He was someone else's and you knew that, so why are you offended? What right do you have to be hurt when you were a part of the deception (lying by omission)?
Donna Lynn Hope
#58. There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.
Cheryl Strayed
#59. I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission. I suffered for years because I was scared to be out. My spirit suffered, my mental health suffered and my relationships suffered. And I'm standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of all that pain.
Ellen Page
#60. The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.
Marya Mannes
#61. States kill when they apply the death penalty, when they send their people to war, or when they carry out extra-judicial or summary executions. They can also kill by omission, when they fail to guarantee to their people access to the bare essentials for life.
Pope Francis
#62. Sins of commission are far more productive of happiness than the sins of omission.
Myrtle Reed
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. The particular sin of omission which gives ground to the evil spirits is the believer's passivity.
Watchman Nee
#67. As a democratic society, Malawi has a moral obligation to ensure that each and every injustice, whether through acts of commission or omission, is met with deliberate and tangible action.
Joyce Banda
#68. Market values are fixed only in part by balance sheets and income statements; much more by the hopes and fears of humanity; by greed, ambition, acts of God, invention, financial stress and strain, weather, discovery, fashion and numberless other causes impossible to be listed without omission.
Gerald M. Loeb
#69. There are sins of omission and sins of commission, my friend. I've dealt with mine and i've forgiven myself ... you should do the same.
Will Fetters
#70. I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree
it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.
James Lee Burke
#71. The truth and regularity of a character is not, in justice, to be looked upon as broken, from any one single act or omission which may seem a contradiction to it:Mthe best of men appear sometimes to be strange compounds of contradictory qualities.
Laurence Sterne
#72. I do believe in [Robert] Bresson's method of creation through omission, not through addition.
Abbas Kiarostami
#73. Some voluntary castaways there will always be, whom no fostering kindness and no parental care can preserve from self-destruction; but if any are lost for want of care and culture, there is a sin of omission in the society to which they belong.
Robert Southey
#74. In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior.
Elizabeth McCracken
#75. A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission.
Marcus Aurelius
#76. It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
Ogden Nash
#77. He manages a sad smile. An omission is not the same thing as a lie, Miss Bishop. It's a manipulation.
Victoria Schwab
#78. Historical omission points toward a culture's subconscious beliefs that some people matter less than others.
Aurin Squire
#79. However, we all sin by omission. Therefore, we are all sinners in constant need of a 'Savior'."
~R. Alan Woods [2010]
R. Alan Woods
#80. Your complete intelligence is designed to experience the fullness of life, not a narrow omission of its best possibilities.
Bryant McGill
#82. Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.
Russell L. Ackoff
#83. 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
#84. The police still found this earlier omission in my statement hard to understand, but they weren't the ones who had been the victim of the Wests, how could they have understood?
Stephen Richards
#85. Sins of omission should be regarded as far more serious than sins of commission,
Stephen Bungay
#86. You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.
Tom Stoppard
#87. [T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#88. Both glory and dominion last forever but glory is for God and dominion is for mankind.
Auliq Ice
#89. Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it.
Robin Hobb
#90. Sins of ignorance or infirmity are to be admonished in a different way than intentional sins of malice of intention. The assurance of forgiveness is not to be offered carelessly by those whose conscience is seared, but to penitents who come contritely to the table of the Lord.
Thomas C. Oden
#91. Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.
Edsger Dijkstra
#92. The imitator treads a beaten walk, and with all his diligence can only find a few flowers or branches untouched by his predecessor, the refuse of contempt, or the omissions of negligence.
Samuel Johnson
#93. It is a sin against God not to pray for the Israel of God, especially for those of them that are under our charge. Good men are afraid of the guilt of omissions ( I Samuel 12).
Matthew Henry
#94. As Christians, if sin were the reason for our afflictions, then we should all be in ICU"
~ R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#95. The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.
Robert A. Heinlein
#96. Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
Jonathan Swift
#97. 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
#98. I never cut my neighbor's throat;
My neighbor's gold I never stole;
I never spoiled his house and land;
But God have mercy on my soul!
For I am haunted night and day
By all the deeds I have not done;
O unattempted loveliness!
O costly valor never won!
Marguerite Wilkinson
#99. Often what people don't say or leave out, tells the real story.
Shannon L. Alder
#100. The last rule was to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I should be certain of omitting nothing.
Rene Descartes
