Making excuses is one of a host of self-defeating behaviours and mental patterns that can block your success.

There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be freeif we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contendingif we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtainedwe must fight!I repeat it, sir, we must fight!! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts, is all that is left us!

Patrick Henry

Saying goodbye doesn't mean anything. It's the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.

Trey Parker

...once you've crawled into what's commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it's all just different versions of normal.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

Carl Sagan

Deficiency motivation doesn't work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

Wayne Dyer

The one who prosperity takes too much delight in will be the most shocked by reverses.

Horace

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

Leo Tolstoy

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Philip Levine

Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?

Lucy Stone, As quoted in The Lif

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Mark Twain

She was of course only too good for him; but as nobody minds having what is too good for them, he was very steadily earnest in the pursuit of the blessing...

Jane Austen