Quotes About Omission

We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn't recognize huge wodges of human experience.

Will you please leave whelks out of it?

My friend, in working upon a case, one does not take into account only the things that are "mentioned". There is no reason to mention many things which may be important. Equally, there is often an excellent reason for not mentioning them.

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.

What do you call the unforgivable error?" "Overlooking the obvious.

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

It seems natural to define the world around what is sought after, but geopolitics can also be considered in terms of what is not wanted.

You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?" "Yes, stupid me, I forgot.

Everyone lies, everyone leaves something out of the narrative.

The great skill in lying is not lying, you'd say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.

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.

Then the exception would be as if he did not exist at all.

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

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.

To comprehend a man's life, it is necessary to know not merely what he does but also what he purposely leaves undone.

The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do.

Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.

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.

Cameron Conaway, Bonemeal

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

The purpose, the picture, and the plan all omit something: a part for them to play. Until that is provided, many people will feel left out and will find it difficult to make a new beginning.

was not made clear in the Treaty.