Quotes about excuses

Your letter of excuses has arrived. I receive the letter but do not admit the excuses except in courtesy, as when a man treads on your toes and begs your pardon -- the pardon is granted, but the joint aches, especially if there is a corn upon it.

— Lord Byron

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

— Benjamin Franklin

Bad excuses are worse than none.

— Thomas Fuller

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals -- and critics of the Women's Movement.

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

— Rudyard Kipling

He who excuses himself, accuses himself.

— Gabriel Meurier

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.

— A. A. Milne

An excuse is worse than a lie, for an excuse is a lie, guarded.

— Alexander Pope

The girl who can't dance says the band can't play.

— Yiddish Proverb

If you don't want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.

— Yiddish Proverb

And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.

— William Shakespeare

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

— Thomas Szasz

Don't make excuses, make good.

— Source Unknown

It is good rule in life to never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

— Sir P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse

I can think of no reason for reason?

— Arnie Sherr

Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk about them.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes