A child is more than the sum of her parts. So are you What you feel about life, about each other, about being parents--if it's on ...the positive side--is probably transcendent. If you enjoy your daughter, enjoy the whims and fancies, funny quirks, blind spots, and special abilities that define her, and show a decent sensitivity to her needs from year to year, that will compensate for all the inevitable false moves and sins of commission and omission and have a dominant influence on your relationship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture to say the greatest mat...ters in the simplest way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men te...aches the art of omission and selection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to re...call a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The adolescent frequently supposes that she is breaking out of the confines of her mundane, schoolgirl existence simply in order t...o 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-...blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vices are character traits. Sins are specific acts of commission or omission. Once Judaism and Christianity adopted the concepts o...f vice and virtue from the Greek and Roman moralists, vices were often called sins and sins vices. The seven deadly "sins" are also called the deadly "vices," which is more accurate. They are basic, perhaps universal human tendencies, from which sins result. The vice of anger spawns the sin of violence against others and the vice of greed gives birth to the sin of theft.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »