Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Excuses can be moral accelerants: they don’t smother wrongdoing, they feed it oxygen. Shakespeare’s line lands because it flips our instinct to “explain” into an accusation. The very act of rationalizing becomes evidence of deeper rot, a kind of secondary offense that compounds the first. You didn’t just do the thing; you recruited language to launder it.

In the world of Shakespeare’s drama, that’s never a neutral move. His characters are forever performing versions of themselves, engineering alibis for desire, ambition, jealousy. An excuse is rarely a simple clarification; it’s a bid for control over how the act will be read. The subtext is about reputation as a battleground. When someone rushes to soften a fault, Shakespeare suggests, they reveal awareness of guilt and a willingness to manipulate the social ledger. The excuse becomes part of the crime because it treats the audience like a jury to be worked, not a community to be answered to.

The phrasing helps: “oftentimes” keeps it worldly rather than preachy, as if this is an observation from someone who’s watched a lot of humans talk themselves into ruin. “Doth make” gives the mechanism a grim inevitability. It’s not that excuses always fail; it’s that they can deepen the fault by turning a moment of weakness into a sustained strategy.

Shakespeare is also warning about self-deception. The excuse doesn’t only persuade others; it rehearses the story until the speaker believes it. That’s how a fault graduates into character.