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
Helpful Omission quotations
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.
Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
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.
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.
The art of drawing is the art of omission.
The omission of good is no less reprehensible than the commission of evil.
Look not to the faults of others, nor to their omissions and commissions.
But rather look to your own acts, to what you have done and left undone.
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.
Omissions are not accidents.
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.
In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.
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 that pain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin, That lays eggs under your skin.
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.
Spin' is a polite word for deception.
Spinners mislead by means that range from subtle omissions to outright lies. Spin paints a false picture of reality by bending facts, mischaracterizing the words of others, ignoring or denying crucial evidence, or just 'spinning a yarn' - by making things up.
Since those don’t hit financial reports, the opportunities you had but didn’t accept, most people don’t bother thinking about them very much. At least that is a mistake we don’t make. We rub our own noses in our mistakes in blowing opportunities, as we just did.
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.
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.
The particular sin of omission which gives ground to the evil spirits is the believer’s passivity.
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.
I do believe in [Robert] Bresson's method of creation through omission, not through addition.
A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission.
There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate.
It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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.