Excuse

“ At present, all those who knew you formerly, believe you guilty without any shadow of excuse. You have never tried to justify yourself, and we have never known where to seek for proofs of your justification. ”

“ Did I not, moreover, make it an apology for a certain absence, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting; and did I not strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition by further accounting morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever made? ”

“ Be just, and without mature consideration, neither excuse nor accuse your poor soul, lest if you excuse it when you should not, you make it insolent, and if you accuse it lightly, you discourage it and make it cowardly. ”

“ No doubt the same excuse is just for ourselves that is just for other people. But we can do something to put ourselves right upon a higher principle, and therefore we should not waste our time in excusing, or even in condemning ourselves, but make haste up the hill. Where we cannot work—that is, in the life of another—we have time to make all the excuse we can. ”

“ I dismiss the unimportant accident of their birth from all consideration; and I find them below the average in every respect. The only excuse which a poor gentleman has for presuming to exist in the nineteenth century, is the excuse of extraordinary ability. ”

“ See all that, and then talk about reason! Reason! It's the coward's excuse, and the rich man's excuse, for doing nothing. It's the excuse of the man who takes jolly good care not to see for fear that he may come to feel! ”

“ It would be quite possible for any one to say: Thou dost excuse and accuse thyself all in one breath, which is a reason for blame, not for escape from blame, inasmuch as the blame, which is mine, is cast on the intellect and on the speech ”

“ Out come examples of oversleeping or dilly-dallying as contrasted with the unavoidable fact that the cars were blocked. “An excuse is hollow; a real reason is stout and whole.” “An excuse is a method of concealment; a good reason is its own justification.” ”

“ It is easy to devise for ourselves this excuse and that, and lay stress on one excuse and another that may lessen the appearance of criminality. But nothing is more to be deprecated, nothing more to be deplored, than success in that very process. ”

“ How long will it take an individual or a nation to conquer prejudices, by continuing to practice and excuse them;—substituting general acknowledgements of their guilt, for immediately and thoroughly repudiating them? ”

“ There is one reason which, in my humble opinion, is far too seldom pleaded in excuse for the glaring faults (glaring because of the high places of the delinquents) of the great and powerful ones of the earth; and that reason is, that the said great and powerful ones find so few who are willing to speak to them of their faults, and reason with them on their shortcomings. ”

“ And unto them, as guiltless then, canst thou thyself excuse?
No, no; not so, for they behold thy double deeds, be sure! No forgèd style, nor flatt'ring phrase, their favour may allure.
No gifts, no gold, can them corrupt; such justice there doth reign: And they that disobey their 'hests, are subject unto pain. ”

“ Hence the expressions, a clumsy appearance, and an awkward manner. When we speak figuratively of an awkward excuse, we think of a want of ease and grace in making it; when we speak of a clumsy excuse, we think of the whole thing as coarse and stupid. ”

“ That importance must excuse—if anything can excuse—the apparent want of taste, of humanity, of decency, in proposing the inquiry at a meeting over which the person chiefly concerned would naturally preside, unless he were warned to absent himself. ”

“ It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use;
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse! ”

“ It is a dangerous Task to answer Objections, because they are helped by the Malice of Mankind.
A bold Accusation doth at first draw such a general Attention, that it gets the World on its side.
To a Man who hath a mind to find a Fault, an Excuse generally giveth farther hold. ”

“ If it is impossible to excuse an action, we can at least modify our blame of it by excusing the intention, or we may lay the blame on the violence of the temptation, or impute it to ignorance, or to the being taken by surprise, or to human weakness, so as at least to try to lessen the scandal of it. If you are told that by doing this you are blessing the unrighteous and seeking excuses for sin, you may reply that without either praising or excusing his sin you can be merciful to the sinner. ”

“ Where is the man that excuses himself on this account? I ask him—is it righteousness for him to excuse himself in order to free himself from blame? If it is not, let him repent, cease his excusations, and turn unto the Lord his God, and work righteousness all the days of his life, that he may be saved in the kingdom of heaven. ”

“ An excuse for a fault is an attempt at partial justification; as, one alleges haste as an excuse for carelessness. Confession is a full acknowledgment of wrong, generally of a grave wrong, with or without apology or excuse. Plea ranges in sense from a prayer for favor or pardon to an attempt at full vindication. Defense, exculpation, justification, and vindication are more properly antonyms than synonyms of apology in its modern sense, and should be so given, but for [52] their connection with its historic usage. ”

“ If she greets you with a glance of cold, surprise, you 'll have your answer, as it were, before the fact you 'll know that there's no manner of hope for you; and the time for passionate avowals will automatically defer itself. But then—? How will you justify your visit? What face can you put on?”
“H'm,” assented Peter, “there's something in that.”
“There's a great deal in that,” said the demon. “You must have an excuse up your sleeve, a pretext. A true excuse is a fine thing in its way; but when you come to a serious emergency, an alternative false excuse is indispensable.” ”

“ For to accuse, requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution more resembles justice. ”

“ Yes, I understand that our Heavenly Father excuses them. We all have a great desire to excuse ourselves, and we desire to be excused by our friends and by our brethren and sisters, and in turn we try to excuse their faults and imperfections in like manner. ”

“ Only their ignorance of what they were doing can be their excuse, but this excuse puts them in the class of boors and savages who act according to selfish desire and not to reason and to the calls of duty. ”

“ It is easy to make such an excuse as this, sufficient to avoid the censures of men, for perhaps they cannot disprove us when we say, We knew it not, or, We forgot; and the temptation to tell a lie for the excusing of a fault is very strong when we know that it is impossible to be disproved, the truth lying wholly in our own breast, as when we say, We thought so and so, and really designed it, which no one is conscious of but ourselves. ”

“ It’s the excuse I’ve always given for your leading such a bad life. ”

“ Why should they invent excuses—when you have made such a fight with so much against you? Besides, you are wrong when you say they might be—a little sorry. Can you believe that it would be easy to let you go away? ”

“ Of course, much is to be said in excuse of man, brute though he be. Consider the multiplicity of his occupations, the practical nature of his cares. But granting the validity of all such excuse, there is in man an original obtuseness of fibre as regards sentiment in comparison with the delicacy of woman’s. ”

“ But people seem—on account of that horrid philosophical and moralising twist—to cast about for an excuse whenever they are doing what is, after all, neither wicked nor silly—to wit, making the best of such days and such powers as a merciful Providence or an indifferent trio of Fates has allowed them. ”

“ Do you think I am so ignorant of the world as to imagine that I am to prescribe to a gentleman what company he is to have at his table?' An excuse must now be made which is certain to meet with sledge-hammer reasoning or piercing sarcasm, and it will then be safe to lead up to the disagreeable intelligence. ”

“ Oh, all these intellectual complications make me sick, disgust me—all this philosophy that uncovers the beast in man, and then seeks to save him, excuse him ... ”

“ We offer an excuse when we have been guilty of some breach or neglect of duty; and we do it by way of extenuating our fault, and with a view to be forgiven. When an excuse has been accepted, an apology may still, in some cases, be necessary or appropriate. ”

“ And though reflection upon conduct may lead us to suppose that our past acts were determined, that desire of pleasure or the wish to avoid pain controlled our wills, the unphilosophical observer interprets, in offenders against morality, such arguments as a mere excuse. ”

“ What excuse has he to offer for the gross and discreditable and unfounded insults which he has heaped on the heads of those under whose protection, and in the enjoyment of whose hospitality, he resides.... ”

“ In the uncharitableness of our hearts we imagine that they have given us excuses which are not reasons. The fact is that they have done exactly the reverse; they have given us reasons which are not excuses. ”

“ The manufacture of excuses has not escaped the notice of the proverb-makers and users. These excuses take two forms—the excuses that omission calls for, and those that commission needs—that black may look at least grey, if not absolutely white. ”

“ We generally give false excuses instead of the real ones. We very seldom blame ourselves for errors, but rather think diligently to study out a way to shift responsibility. Nearly the whole brood of our apologies is hatched from the serpent's egg, and then we ignorantly or hypocritically manifest surprise that our own offspring should develop an inclination to deceive or misrepresent! ”

“ Something silly inside of me invariably finds excuses for people, whatever they are or do. I'm always saying to myself, 'They don't understand. If they really knew all the circumstances, they wouldn't hate me. ”

“ How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defence and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself? ”

“ in her face excuse
Came prologue, and apology too prompt; ”

“ Girls, when you are ready to excuse yourselves for doing wrong by saying somebody "made you," think whether your words are true, and whether if "somebody" had tried to "make you" do right, you would have been as easily led. Remember that God sees your heart, and He will accept no false excuses; and while He is always ready to give you His Holy Spirit to guide you, you have no right to let any human being "make you" do wrong.
"My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not."
LOUISA, OR, "JUST ONE MINUTE." Frontispiece.
LOUISA,
OR,
"JUST ONE MINUTE!" ”

“ An infinity of excuses can always be found for non-action. ”

“ Short of the incredible, the stranger the story the better the excuse; for an extraordinary event requires an extraordinary excuse. But we shall hardly be reassured if he merely gazes at us in a dreamy and wistful fashion and says, "After all, what is property? ”

“ I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?" ”

“ But the degree of his knowledge is measured by these circumstances whether the doer did his action secretly, openly, under compulsion or through persuasion. The fact of the absence of knowledge is brought forward as an excuse, and its parts are actual ignorance, accident, necessity. ”

“ And you, probably for the twentieth time, accept excuses which mean nothing but 'I am a privileged person,' and go on again as before, hoping for better things against all the lessons of past experience. ”