"Curse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... parsing, and it remains innocent as long as it is not wilfully yielded to and indulged. But to yield to the ratification of an evil desire or propensity, without restraint, is to doom oneself to the most prolific of evils and to lie under the curse of God. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... what did I find? No word of all this. Much—thank God, I may say one continuous undercurrent—of the very opposite of all this. I pray you bear with me, even though I may seem impertinent. But what do we find in the Bible, with the exception of that first curse? That, remember, cannot mean any alteration in the laws of nature by which man's labour should only produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles. For, in the first place, any such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... will creep all right over Ape's Face several times; though perhaps you may agree with me at the end that the book is really an enlarged Christmas tale, and would gain by being reduced to magazine dimensions. I have I not yet told you what it is all about. Very briefly, there is a family and a curse. This curse—with regard to the exact details of which I still find myself a little vague—used to express itself by causing murders from time to time among the brothers and sisters of the House. The tale is told in a detached and purposely elusive way that adds much to its effect, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... birch; it fell tempestuously over dams and fought its way between rocky cliffs crowned with stately firs. It rolled past forests of pine and hemlock and spruce, now gentle, now terrible; for there is said to be an Indian curse upon the Saco, whereby, with every great sun, the child of a paleface shall be drawn into its cruel depths. Lashed into fury by the stony reefs that impeded its progress, the river looked now sapphire, now gold, now white, now leaden gray; ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... entire experience has gone to prove that the use of alcohol in any form with opium-eaters undergoing cure is worse than useless, almost invariably redoubling their suffering from loss of opium, and frequently rendering the craving for a return to their curse an incontrollable agony. I therefore leave it entirely out, alike of my pharmacopia and my ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Needless to say, he was soundly trounced for the misadventure; handy odds and ends were thrown at him; he was reminded of his daring promises on the eve of engagement, and an impassioned oration was delivered on the curse of engaging "useless rubbish who could not guide their stomachs when they got to sea." His troubles had begun. The flow of curses, which he now heard for the first time in his life, cut deeply into his little soul, and made him long to be landed, so that he might even wash ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... strength and fury full, raise high Their swords: backs, ribs and wrists are slashed; the flesh Cut through rent garments to the quick; along The verdant soil the red blood runs in streams. The Pagans cry:—"We cannot more endure! Great land, Mohammed curse thee!—More than all This people bold."—Not one who does not cry "Marsile! ride on, O King, thy aid we ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... sooner expect a curse would follow an act of so much heartlessness, sir. Our clergyman has been with us since his entrance into the duties of his holy office; and it will be difficult to suppose that the Divine favour would follow the commission of so selfish and capricious a step, with a ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... been tumbling my thoughts up and down a good deal. Melancholy, I suppose, is the curse of the thinking classes; but I confess my soul wears a great uneasiness these days! The sudden and amazing turnover in human affairs, dramatic beyond anything in history, already seems to be taken ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... serve their own interested purposes. For, according to the system of policy the States shall adopt at this moment, they will stand or fall; and, by their confirmation or lapse, it is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse:—a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Yellow Brian found all the land desolate, and liked it. The more wasted the land, he reflected, the more chance for that sword of his to find swinging-room. As he had ridden, news had come from the east—news of the Wexford killing and the curse that was come upon the land. Owen Ruadh O'Neill was not yet dead, but Brian knew that he had prophesied truly. Ireland's day was ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... as these: the serpent in Eden, the Ark, Jacob's vision for the multiplication of his cattle, the speaking of Balaam's ass, the axe swimming at Elisha's word, the miracle on the swine, and various instances of prayers or prophecies, in which, as in that of Noah's blessing and curse, words which seem the result of private feeling are expressly or virtually ascribed to a Divine ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... ("your father") might be understood in the sense in which it is used every day in the East, where abuc means, "God curse your father!" ...
— Egyptian Literature
... which God made with Noah; when He said, "I will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake, neither will I smite any more everything living as I have done. While the Earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and Winter and Summer, and day and night shall not cease. I will establish My covenant with you, and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the fellows nearest me again ventured the remark that he thought our number was up, and I just had enough vocal power left to curse him roundly for a damn fool. "You know what happened Lawrence, don't you? Cheer up, you mutt! They will ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... their drunken state, drag by the hand each other, and girls like the one whom I saw taken to the station-house; they drag with them cabmen, and they ride and they walk from one tavern to another; and they curse and stagger, and say they themselves know not what. I had previously seen such unsteady gait on the part of factory-hands, and had turned aside in disgust, and had been on the point of rebuking them; but ever since ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... think, Howard." Mrs. Gray pressed his hand in return, smiling bravely through her tears. "I'm an old fool to give way like this, an' a worse one to let you catch me at it. But it ain't wholly Edith I'm cryin' about. Land, every time I start to curse the devil for Jack Weston, I get interrupted because I have to stop an' thank the Lord for Peter. An' all the angels in heaven together singin' Halleluia led by Gabriel for choir-master, couldn't half express my feelin's for Sylvia! I guess 'twould ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... completely free from the cares which beset at least five-sixths of the English race. They have worries; they take taxis because they must not indulge in motor-cars, hansoms because taxis are an extravagance, and omnibuses because they really must economize. But they never look twice at twopence. They curse the injustice of fate, but secretly they are aware of their luck. When they have nothing to do, they say, in effect: "Let's go out and spend something." And they go out. They spend their lives in spending. They deliberately gaze into shop windows in order to discover ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... is a part of this Union! And when the curse of slavery is lifted, it should be the garden spot of the world—I love every foot of its soil—every hill and valley, and every man, woman and child in it. I am ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... are so different for men. When I think of her, the little, soft, fragile thing I married, shut up alone in a cell, wearing prison garments, eating rough prison food, being ordered about by harsh, domineering women, why, I almost curse myself that I am free to walk about under God's ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... "No, curse it, you must give me my revenge. I'm always five points better after lunch, and after dinner I could give you fifteen points. Why shouldn't you stop and dine and sleep? I expect some men ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and determined expression of mouth. This animal was now lying down near the table, so tired and footsore from almost perpetual running that he thought it too much trouble to get up and eat. I read in his eye that he was in the habit of breathing every day of his life a canine curse on the business of cattle-dealing. His master seemed a good-natured man, but he had a fixed idea that was unfortunate for the dog. He considered that the beast ought to be able to run from thirty-five to ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... being intimate with the wife of Isagoras. First then Cleomenes sent a herald to Athens demanding the expulsion of Cleisthenes and with him many others of the Athenians, calling them the men who were under the curse: 62 this message he sent by instruction of Isagoras, for the Alcmaionidai and their party were accused of the murder to which reference was thus made, while he and his friends had no ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand, and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so forcible. Mr. Lorry's spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his two companions ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... in our blood—the tendency to centralized tyranny. We are but a few years removed from its curse. As we grow in years, the temptation to make Washington the gilded Capital of an Empire becomes more and more apparent. Unless we control this tendency to lapse into the past, we are lost and the story of our fallen Republic will be but one more added to the failures of history. Unless ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... short in height, but prodigiously muscular, strong, and thick-set, with a surly and savage scowl upon his unpleasant features. He spoke with a foreign accent, and upbraided the gipsy for keeping him waiting so long, ordering her, with a curse, to come and bless his ship before it set out on its voyage. While still addressing the gipsy, he caught sight of Guy Mannering, and was about to draw a weapon against him, when she told him that he was a friend ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... have not thrust from themselves the Christian God, is verily no honor to their religious talent, not to speak of their taste. They ought to have got the better of such a sickly and decrepit product of decadence. There lies a curse upon them, because they have not got the better of it: they have incorporated sickness, old age and contradiction into all their instincts—they have created no God since! Two millenniums almost, and not a single new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an ultimatum ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... the old "Non Angli," and recall it, not by their beauty, but by their sweetness of expression, even though signed already with trace and cloud of the coming life,—a life so bitter that it would make the curse of the 137th Psalm true upon our modern Babylon, though we were to read it thus, "Happy shall thy children be, if one taketh and ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... Albanian Catholic clergy, had been compelled to remain for eight months in the church and its precincts, seeing that the Government was powerless to guarantee that he would not be overtaken by that national curse, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... very important parts of house plumbing. Great care must be bestowed upon the construction, material, fitting, etc., of the plumbing fixtures, that they be a source of comfort in the house instead of becoming a curse ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... had no dogs to lick their sores. They have lived on offal so long that they have the faces of the extremely aged. And their hatred! Directly you utter the word "Boche," all the little night-gowned figures sit up in their cots and curse. When they have done cursing, of their own accord, they ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... light our rooms. Fervour of a Christian spirit is all right when it is yoked to Christian work, and made to draw what else is a heavy chariot. It is not emotion, but it is indolent emotion, that is the curse of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... and many kind deeds, she had inspired the love and reverence of the whole community. When the pest came in 1150—that awful black death which killed the people by hundreds—they turned to her in their despair and begged her to intercede with them and take away this curse of God, as it was believed to be. Through an entire night, within her grotto, the good Rosalia prayed that the plague might be taken away and the people forgiven, and the story has it that her prayers were answered at once. At her death she was made the patron saint ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of Kansas against the will of a majority of her people? This, of course, was only preliminary to the larger question: Shall the National Government, under lead of the Slave Oligarchy, be given power to spread over new territory, at will, the blight and curse of human bondage? Upon this foremost question of the day, Senator Broderick stood side by side with Stephen A. Douglas in opposition to the Buchanan Administration, and its mad attempt to force slavery ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... fairy interrupted, "Do not tremble nor weep! That cruel curse I can change and soften, And instead of ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... fettering, by set purpose, of art is a very considerable step towards the fettering of life itself. England may sometimes have failed in kindness to her own artistic children, living and dead; but at any rate we have been free from the curse of a narrow jealousy and have steadfastly held to the proud faith of the open door and the open mind. The ideal—so violently dinned into our ears nowadays—of a national school of composers may very easily ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the results of the Land Law passed in 1881. And under the curse so engendered the country is now labouring. It cannot be denied that the promoters of the Land Laws are weak, and that the disciples of the Landleague are strong. In order that the truth of this may be seen and made apparent, the present ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... said nothing. Still he could not help recalling how one old labourer's wife had shaken her head and spit upon the ground as his father went by, and wondered in his mind whether this was some form of curse. ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... cried the doctor; "he began to curse them in Hindustani for stopping his gharry, ordered them to let his servants go by, and the idiots took it that a complete change had come over the state of affairs; that Dost must have turned rajah, and was using the English as his slaves. So they all shouted with delight, ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... was in his Washington apartment. He went over to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was bright blue, some minutes later, he didn't feel any better. Cursing ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... had covered half of the distance that separated them he was overjoyed to recognize him as Matak. As Terry's lips parted in a low call, Matak glided from the tree like a swift shadow just as a shriek of pain and terror rent the silence of the woods, followed by a vowelled curse and the sound of a heavy hand ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... conqueror of the Cassites, Nebuchadnezzar I., also holds Ramman in high esteem. For him, Ramman is the god of battle who in companionship with Ishtar abets the king in his great undertakings. He addresses Ramman as the great lord of heaven, the lord of subterranean waters and of rain, whose curse is invoked against the one who sets aside the decrees of Nebuchadnezzar or who defaces the monument the king sets up. While acknowledging the supremacy of Marduk, upon whose appeal he proceeds to Babylonia to rid the country of its oppressors, Nebuchadnezzar ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... hast been so highly elevated by me; now thou spurnest at thy benefactor. May the curse and vengeance of God fall upon thee ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... through my brain Hath searched, and stung to grief This sunny day, as if a curse ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... and he shook it at the spectators behind the white lights of the automobiles. "God damn you!" he yelled; and so they tied him up, and a fresh man stepped forward and picked up the whip, and spit on his hands for good luck, and laid on with a double will; and at every stroke Glikas yelled a fresh curse; first in English, and then, as if he were delirious, in some foreign language. But at last his curses died away, and he too sank insensible, and was unhitched and dragged away and dumped down beside the first man. "Number three!" called ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... then shalt thou stretch forth thy hand and remove that which separates us.' Ishullanu said to thee: 'I, what dost thou require from me? O my mother, prepare no food for me, I myself will not eat: anything I should eat would be for me a misfortune and a curse, and my body would be stricken by a mortal coldness.' Then thou didst hear him and didst become angry, thou didst strike him, thou didst transform him into a dwarf, thou didst set him up on the middle of a couch; he could not rise up, he could not get down from ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... seen Wood since the beginning of the skirmish, when he hurried forward. When the firing opened some of the men began to curse. "Don't swear—shoot!" growled Wood, as he strode along the path leading his horse, and everyone laughed and became cool again. The Spanish outposts were very near our advance guard, and some minutes ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... know why the daisy is white, my dear, I know why the seas are blue; I know that the world is a dream, my dear, and I know that the dream is true; I know why the rose and the toad-stool grow, as a curse and a crimson boon, Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... like snowdrifts,—a cemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lantern glimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are having their fodder betimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself on the nearest rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like some irate old cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along the gray of the serpentine turnpike,—a cart, with the driver lashing a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by, and ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... be joyful, but great should be our grief, For Spain has lost her guardian, Castile hath lost her chief; The Moorish host is pouring like a river o'er the land; Curse on the Christian ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... and with little delay, to mature some measure which would meet the demand of the people. "Let us tolerate no further procrastination," said he; "and while we justly hold the President responsible for the trouble and mal-administration which now curse the South and disturb the peace of the country, let us remember that the national odium already perpetually linked with the name of Andrew Johnson will be shared by us if we fail in the great duty which is ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... the same time to the king of Ethiopia, who had before professed Islamism, and now in his answer repeated his profession of it. He wrote to two other Arabian princes, who sent him disagreeable answers, which provoked him to curse them. He sent also to Al Mondar, king of Bahrain, who came into his religion, and afterward routed the Persians and made a great slaughter of them. And now all the Arabians of Bahrain had become converts to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... Mohammedan—will not let "the Whig dogs have the best of the argument." He charges Moseilema with having perverted sundry chapters in the Koran by his lies and impostures, and declares that he did worse than fail when he attempted to imitate Mohammed's miracles. "Now Moseilema (whom may Allah curse!), when he put his luckless hand on the head of some one who had not much hair, the man was at once quite bald... and when he laid his hand upon the head of an infant, saying, 'Live a hundred years,' the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... with a "One, two, three, heave!" were flung over the side, to be instantly fought over and torn to pieces by some half a dozen sharks which had put in an unsuspected appearance on the scene. Many a curse, "not loud but deep," was called down upon the skipper's head that night by the shipmates of the murdered men—for murdered they undoubtedly were—and many a vow of complete and speedy vengeance was solemnly registered. ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... adverted once more to the roguery which had been, in my opinion, practised upon him, and asked him what had become of the gold plates. He informed me that they were in a trunk with the large pair of spectacles. I advised him to go to a magistrate, and have the trunk examined. He said 'the curse of God' would come upon him should he do this. On my pressing him, however, to pursue the course which I had recommended, he told me he would open the trunk if I would take 'the curse of God' upon myself. I replied I would do so with the greatest ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... curse the priests lighted the torches, took the royal mummy, placed it again in its casket, and the casket in the stone sarcophagus which had the human form in its general outlines. Then, in spite of the shrieks, the despair, and the resistance of wailers, they bore ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... as institutions there should be no rules, no regulations which are not in full operation in the Waldorf-Astoria or the Hotel St. Regis. The curse of all such attempts in the past has been the insistence upon coercive morality. Make them not only non-sectarian, but non-religious. There is no more need of conducting a working girls' hotel or lodging-house in the name of God or under the auspices of religious sentiment ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... travellers, one of whom was the blacksmith, in the course of which they bestowed some opprobrious terms upon each other; and it is worthy of remark, that an African will sooner forgive a blow than a term of reproach applied to his ancestors. "Strike me, but do not curse my mother," is a common expression even among the slaves. This sort of abuse, therefore, so enraged one of the disputants, that he drew his cutlass upon the blacksmith, and would certainly have ended the dispute in a very serious manner, if ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... tradition, eighteen peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the church-yard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into the earth, and remained the whole time without nourishment, until they were finally released by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in the honest community life; no hand to shake, no neighbor's meal to share; and this unexpected public arraignment smote him between the eyes. With resentment newly kindled, pride wounded, vanity bleeding, he flung a curse at the joyous throng and drove toward home, the home where he would find his ragged children and meet the timid eyes of a woman who had been the loyal partner of his ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... day end with the familiarities of the loud-voiced brewer. The principal case to be tried was a melancholy one enough—a miserable history or wayward desire, shame and suffering, followed by a despairing course of lies and petty thieving to help support the poor baby whose advent seemed so wholly a curse. The young mother—a pretty, desperate creature—made no attempt at denial. She owned she had robbed her mistress of a shilling here and sixpence there, that she had taken now a bit of table silver and then a garment ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the workingman's wages. Every laborer on the farm, in the harvest field, every sailor, and men employed in many of the trades, as carpenters and masons, demanded daily grog at the cost of the employer. About 1810 a temperance movement put an end to much of this. But intemperance remained the curse of the workingman down to the days of Van Buren and Tyler, when a greater temperance ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... Naturally the curse of Costecalde is Tartarin. So much fame for a single man! He everywhere! always he! And slowly, subterraneously, like a worm within the gilded wood of an idol, he saps from below for the last twenty years that triumphant renown, and gnaws it, and hollows it. When, in the evening, at ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... my miserable son-in-law's house under a curse? The yellow-haired woman in the open carriage drove up to the door at half-past ten this morning, in a state of distraction. Felicia and I saw her from the drawing-room balcony—a tall woman in gorgeous garments. She knocked with her own hand at the door—she cried ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... light into the modest academies of the rabbis. Wherever a ray fell, a blossom of Haggadic folklore sprang up. Every occurrence in life recommends itself to their loving scrutiny: pleasures and follies of men, curse turned into blessing, the ordinary course of human events, curiosities of Israel's history and mankind's. As instances of their method, take what Midrashic folklore has to say concerning the creation ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... her wedlock fame; No part is Mac from top to toe, You're either Rose or else Munro. When to the house you turned your face, Let it be told to your disgrace, 'Twas for the dregs you had forgot, The Poet's curse be in your throat. ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... conversation unpleasant, at least to those who do not use the same foolish way of discourse, and, indeed, is an affront to all the company who swear not as he does; for if I swear and curse in company I either presume all the company likes it or ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... I don't believe they'll do anything to me, because they'll look upon me as a boy, and I'm reckoning upon its being the grandest piece of fun I ever had. If they do chop me short off, I leave you my curse if you don't take down my head off the spike they'll stick it on, at the top of Temple Bar, out of spite because they could not get Sir Robert's. Good-bye, old usurper worshipper. I can't help ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... has now got into the Kaiser's people too: Prince Eugene is grown heavier with his drills than we ourselves. He is often three hours at it;—and the Kaiser's people curse us for the same, at a frightful rate. Adieu. If the Devil don't get thee, he ought. Therefore VALE. [OEuvres de Frederic, xxvii. part ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... German, after a while. "For years I have tried to get in touch with native officers. Here and there I have found a Sepoy who would talk with me, but you are the first officer." He was brown-studying, talking almost to himself. He did not see the curse in the risaldar-major's eyes. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... against persons considered guilty of injustice and wrong doing. It is to such fearful imprecations that the misfortune and downfall of certain houses have been attributed, although, it may be, centuries have elapsed before their final fulfilment. Such curses, too, unlike the fatal "Curse of Kehama," have rarely turned into blessings, nor have they been thought to be as harmless as the curse of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Rheims, who banned the thief—both body and soul, his life and for ever—who stole his ring. It was an awful curse, but none of the guests seemed the worse for it, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... of the Mission, and the Indians go to her by night when dreams have warned them that death threatens. She is a terribly wise old woman, Senor, for she can look into the past and part the curtain which hides the future. For gold will she part it. And for gold will she put the curse or the blessing where curse or blessing is needed most. Go you to the old woman and have her put a blessing upon the riata when it is dressed and you have prayed your prayers upon it, Senor! For five pesos ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... where I should look for some comfort, together with the consideration of my cruel destiny, my days and times worn out in trouble and imprisonment—is sufficient either utterly to distract me, or to make me curse the time that ever I was born into the world, and ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... to stop, having tired out the Antwerpians, whom they had seen return to the town, followed by the soldiers of the Prince of Orange—when those who had escaped from the carnage of the night believed themselves saved, and stopped to breathe for an instant, some with a prayer, and others with a curse, then a new enemy, blind and pitiless, was preparing for them. Joyeuse had commanded his sailors, now reduced to eight hundred, to make a halt; they were the only persons who had preserved some order, the Comte de St. Aignan having vainly tried to ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... who give, and blessed in those who receive. Patronage is twice cursed,—cursed in the incompetency which it places where merit ought to be, and in the incompetency which it creates among the class who make it their trust. But the curse which you have mainly to avoid is that which so often falls on those who waste their time and suffer their energies to evaporate in weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there is One other on whom you must rely; ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... his liege. A star shot: 'Lo,' said Gareth, 'the foe falls!' An owl whoopt: 'Hark the victor pealing there!' Suddenly she that rode upon his left Clung to the shield that Lancelot lent him, crying, 'Yield, yield him this again: 'tis he must fight: I curse the tongue that all through yesterday Reviled thee, and hath wrought on Lancelot now To lend thee horse and shield: wonders ye have done; Miracles ye cannot: here is glory enow In having flung ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... wouldn't hurt you for anything in the world. I'm sorry, Dad, awfully sorry——" He hesitated, then his voice rang out clearly. There was in his tone, when he spoke again, a recognition of that loneliness which is the curse ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... possible to save the masses of them from entering into polygamy or prostitution, legal or illegal. Whichever way I turn, whatever phase of social life presents itself, the same conclusion comes: "Independent bread alone can redeem woman from her curse of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... completed?—Perhaps not, even yet. For it is the penalty of being loyal to Enchanted Wiggeries; of living cheek-by-jowl with lies of a peaceable quality, and stuffing your nostrils, and searing your soul, against the accursed odor they all have!—For I can assure you the curse of Heaven does dwell in one and all of them; and the son of Adam cannot too soon get quit of their bad partnership, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... taunt addressed to him by his brother-poet Slowacki: 'Thou wert afraid, son of a noble.' He was often conscious of his weakness as when he wrote to Henry Reeve in 1830: 'I am a fool, I am a coward, I am a wretched being, I have the heart of a girl, I do not dare to brave a father's curse.' But it is right to remember that he was physically a weakling, tormented by ill-health, neurotic, and half-blind from his nineteenth year. Torn in two by the conflict between filial duty and the desire to serve his country, always dreading the worst for himself, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... judgment, and every sorrow and suffering which the Governor of the world has connected with sin—as the drunkard's loss of character and property, of peace and happiness, the frenzy of his soul, and the destruction of his body—is a type and teaching of the curse which ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... while he was musing with a certain tenseness on these things that the sound of footsteps came to him from below. But almost in the first instant the hope that this might be J. B. Wheeler, the curse of the human race, died away. Whoever was coming up the stairs was running, and J. B. Wheeler never ran upstairs. He was not one of your lean, haggard, spiritual-looking geniuses. He made a large income with his brush ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... went home in his own neck. After that, 'twas easy work to hold off the other two, one of whom was the drunken fool who had blabbed his secret days ago, had I only heeded it, in my sick cabin. Finding me stubborn, and further passage barred, they sheered off with a curse and hastened forward. I durst not follow them; for it might be a feint to decoy me from my post. So, with all the haste I could, I threw up an out-work of lumber, sails, spars, and boxes across the deck some distance in front of the poop, and, relieving my two fallen assailants of their knives, ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... family. Before Christianity these tales of tribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and the revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the end of a sultry afternoon: I was on a terrace in one of those villages of ours, jammed, like some hardy bush, in the gash of a hill-side. I saw the storm rush down the valley, a sudden blackness, and then, like a curse, a flash, a tremendous crash, re-echoed by a dozen hills. "I told him," Dionea said very quietly, when she came to stay with me the next day (for Sor Agostino's family would not have her for another half-minute), "that if he did not leave me alone Heaven would ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... started again, and I hope that I shall never be called on to go through what I did that day. But if I lived to be a hundred I could never forget it. Our trench was literally blown to pieces, and we couldn't do a thing but sit there and curse our gunners for not firing back—no doubt they were doing all they could, but the terrific noise of bursting shells all around us drowned the sound of our own artillery, and we fancied that we were not being supported. Wounded men were crawling along ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... "Curse me if I think so, doctor!" replied the dying uncircumcised Philistine. But he added at whiles, his breathlessness being grievous, and often broken by a sore hiccup, "I am, however, no saint, as you know, doctor; so I wish you to put in a word for me, doctor; for you know that in these ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... she expresses it. It was a life that suited her well for the time-being as devoid of hardship or terror as it was of improvement; a need which had not yet become a want. Instead of improving at this place, morally, she retrograded, as their example taught her to curse; and it was here that she took her first oath. After living with them for about a year and a half, she was sold to one John J. Dumont, for the sum of seventy pounds. This was in 1810. Mr. Dumont lived in the same county as her former ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... fields, rich of soil, and tilled and tended with that French care and thoroughness that the war has intensified. Even small irregular patches at road-crossings have been cultivated for the precious grain these last two years. "The Boche will get all this, curse him!" muttered the colonel. ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... splendor of this idea of salvation. It is not merely final "safety," to be forgiven sin, to evade the curse. It is not, vaguely, "to get to heaven." It is to be conformed to the Image of the Son. It is for these poor elements to attain to the Supreme Beauty. The organizing Life being Eternal, so must this Beauty be immortal. Its progress toward ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... hesitate a moment as to what ought to be done. That everlastingly condemned meddler, Horn, must never be allowed to put his oar into this business. If he were not content with the gold which he had for himself, he should curse the day that he had tried to keep other people from getting the gold that they wanted for themselves. No matter what had to be done, he must never reach the Dunkery Beacon—he must never know what had happened to her. Here was a piece of work for the Vittorio to ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... mind's worst evil; and 'tis a friendly office to drive it from the bosom. Thus far has fortune crowned me—Yet Beverley is rich; rich in his wife's best treasure; her honour and affections. I would supplant him there too. But 'tis the curse of thinking minds, to raise up difficulties. Fools only conquer women: fearless of dangers which they see not, they press on boldly, and by persisting, prosper. Yet may a tale of art do much. Charlotte is sometimes absent. The seeds of jealousy are sown already: ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... turned blood-red. And with a curse that sounded in his ears like the snarl of a beast, Winthrop Adams Endicott tightened his grip upon the revolver and headed the horse ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... are deemed worthy by God of being fit for this office.' At the same time, however, speak seriously with them also, saying, 'Know ye that the Israelites are a troublesome and stiff-necked people, and that you must ever be prepared to have them curse you or cast stones ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... He continued: "Your curse thus far has been want of steady application, and moreover you're too easily scared. No matter what happens this time, ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" (Rom. viii:19-22). Sin has brought a curse upon creation. The thorns and thistles are the result of the fall of man as well as the blight and misery which rests upon a creation, which was pronounced good by the Creator. But this condition into which creation has been plunged will not continue forever. A better day is coming. Groaning ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... a pale-faced little thing, with the lustrous eyes and delicate skin that often so pathetically array the prospective victims of the White Man's Curse. She had been a tiny, unwanted item in a large family of twelve with which "Providence had blessed" a struggling friend and neighbor. The arrival of the last had robbed him of his only help. "Daddy gived me to Uncle Rube," was her only explanation ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... sometimes with profanity, which was evident in almost everything he said. This it was which chiefly pleased the waiter and the muleteers, who were his usual listeners, since they were together on the road. They would laugh and curse him in religious terms for a blasphemer and a wicked atheist, reproofs which he received as high applause. It was his custom to salute his friends with insults, which they took kindly from him, being what he was. They told me in low tones of awe, yet with a chuckle, that he had ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... 2,700 B.C.,—the promise of the Deliverer, the "Seed of the woman" who should bruise the serpent's head, was well known and highly valued; so highly valued that a large part of the sky was devoted to its commemoration and to that of the curse on the serpent. The story of the Flood was also known, and especially the covenant made with those who were saved in the ark, that the world should not again be destroyed by water, the token of which covenant was the "Bow set in the cloud." The fourfold cherubic forms were known, ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... farther and farther astray. In vain he beholds the guiding-stars of heaven shining before him. No choice is left him—he must descend the precipice, and offer himself up a sacrifice to his fate. After the false step which I had rashly made, and which entailed a curse upon me, I had, in the wantonness of passion, entangled one in my fate who had staked all her happiness upon me. What was left for me to do in a case where I had brought another into misery, but to make a desperate leap in the dark to save her?—the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... mysterious power which the spirits of the dead have, to haunt the living. That voiceless soul had cried to the wornout soul of the sleeper; it had uttered its last farewell, or its reproach, or its curse on the man who had not ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... other Catholic princes' aid, shall charge you with the crime and pain of heretics for maintaining an heretical pretensed Queen against the public sentence of Christ's vicar? Can she with her feigned supremacy absolve and acquit you from the Pope's excommunication and curse?" The news of the landing of this force stirred in England a Protestant frenzy that foiled the scheme for a Catholic marriage with the Duke of Anjou; while Elizabeth, panic-stricken, urged the French king to save her from Philip by an invasion of the ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... to be baptized was in his mind, and in his words, "a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth was the beginning of what was never to end; sin—his own and that of the race—was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it—of its exceeding sinfulness—haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Indian children would hate the winter so much as these two mites do,' said Miss Hunter one evening at dinner; 'they seem to look upon it as a regular curse. I should have thought the very novelty ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... senate decreed festivals and sacrifices for this victory, Cato declared it to be his opinion that Caesar ought to be given into the hands of the barbarians, that so the guilt which this breach of faith might otherwise bring upon the state, might be expiated by transferring the curse on him, who was the occasion of it. Of those who passed the Rhine, there were four hundred thousand cut off; those few who escaped were sheltered by the Sugambri, a people of Germany. Caesar took hold of this pretense to invade the Germans, being at the same time ambitious of the honor of being ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... a master of wit and phrase, and many of his best sayings and definitions have become proverbial, e.g. "the hansom, the 'gondola' of London," "our young Queen and our old institutions," "critics, men who have failed," "books, the curse ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... discover any fraud. After about a month the maid was sent home, where she was not molested. Naturally we see in her the half-insane cunning of hysteria, but that explanation does not apply to little Master Dolleans, a baby of three months old. The curse fell on him: however closely his parents watched him, pots and pans showered into his cradle, the narrator himself saw a miscellaneous collection of ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang |
