Curse

“ Now fair befall thee and thy noble house!
Thy garments are not spotted with our blood,
Nor thou within the compass of my curse. 284
Buck. Nor no one here; for curses never pass
The lips of those that breathe them in the air. ”

“ Lear, on his knees, bareheaded, with heavenward eye, quivering lip, and hands clasped together in agony, pronounced the terrible curse, and in his death realised all that can be imagined of human woe. ”

“ A curse is on its trembling walls, Its mighty veil asunder falls! Well may the cavern-depths of Earth Be shaken, and her mountains nod; Well may the sheeted dead come forth To see the suffering son of God! Well may the temple-shrine grow dim, And shadows veil the Cherubim, When He, the chosen one of Heaven, A sacrifice for guilt is given! And shall the sinful heart, alone, Behold unmoved the fearful hour, When Nature trembled on her throne, And Death resigned his iron power? ”

“ For things I dream—o’er moments wasted
And sometimes interrupt my song
With clenched fist to curse a wrong—
It is a joy to curse a wrong.
And so I sing and sigh and curse—
All life doth sing and sigh and curse. ”

“ I curse my whole life, its joys and its sorrows! I curse myself, my ears, my eyes, my heart, my tongue, my head! All those things which thou hast given me I fling back in thy face, thou Fate, thou Demon! Cursed be thou—aye, cursed for ever! Yet with this very curse will I vanquish thee at the last. For, in truth, what more canst thou do unto me? Strike me, if thou wilt—aye, strike me to the ground: I will yet laugh aloud in thy face, and cry, "My curse be upon thee, my curse be upon thee!" ”

“ The monstrous blasphemy of creeds
Which represent an angry God,
Who tempts man sorely through his needs,
And meets his failings with a rod—
Eternal wrath, through blood appeased,
The curse of God, salvation’s plan,
Are nightmare visions, which have seized
The slumbering consciousness of man. ”

“ Thy curses thou hast cursed mankind withal,
⁠With what curse shall man curse thee back again?
II.
By the brute soul that made man's soul its food;
⁠By time grown poisonous with it; by the hate
⁠And horror of all souls not miscreate;
By the hour of power that evil hath on good ”

“ I have despised the world too long to care a single curse what it says or thinks of me, or about me. All I'm sorry for is, that I didn't take more out of it, and that I let it slip through my hands so asily as I did. My curse upon it and its villany! ”

“ An orphan's curse would drag to Hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is a curse in a dead man's eye! ”

“ For since at the transgression man died the dreadful death of the soul, and received curse upon curse—Thistles and thorns shall the ground bring forth unto thee, and again, Thou shalt till the ground, and it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her fruits—thorns and thistles sprouted and sprang up in the ground of his heart. ”

“ Ill assorted marriages; the right man to the wrong woman, and the wrong man to the right woman; envyings, jealousies, hatred, murders, all the works of the natural man, combine together to form that marvellous story which begins with a curse—the curse of ill-gotten gold—and ends with a curse, a widow’s curse, which drags down all on whom it falls, and even her own flesh and blood, to certain doom. ”

“ Hearing that this curse hath been uttered in the presence of the Immutable, the Infinite, and the True one, my heart trembleth. Surely, our annihilation hath come. Otherwise why should not the Immutable Lord prevent our mother while uttering the curse? ”

“ If you should wed, may a father's curse
⁠Be your swift and sure undoing.
“My curse shall feed on your fields of corn,
⁠On your roof-tree make its nesting,
Your wife shall wish your child unborn
⁠As he pines on her sore heart resting.”
Now when this cruel oath he said
⁠The youth did chide him, crying,
“Since I have neither field nor bed
⁠Your curse shall fall to dying. ”

“ Too well we know the torture it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind, which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts. ”

“ Three several times the earth has been cursed, which curse is gradually removed as man returns unto his God in loving and obedient service. “And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. ”

“ Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,—
Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips,260
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men ”

“ Are not the drunkards warned every day by this word, that the curse of the Lord shall come upon them? Is not every one of you, according to your several stations and circumstances, warned to forsake your wicked ways, and your evil thoughts, to flee from the wrath to come, before the decree of the Lord pass forth, and before his fury burn as an oven? ”

“ Of course the lesson is that Life—the fig-tree—has no right to be barren of results,—but why curse it, if it is? What is the use of a curse at any time? And what, may equally be asked, is the use of a blessing? ”

“ The old blood remains fresh on the ground, crying for other blood to blot it out. The deed of wrong begets children in its own likeness. The first sin produces an 'Arâ,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and perhaps the race of the sinner. ”

“ The curse causeless will not come, but a curse deserved is the foreshadowing of the ultimate issue of events. The curse of the oppressed, who have no man to deliver them, is at times but the presage of the retribution which the operation of the laws of the moral world will some day bring about. ”

“ But verses, where should sacred prayers be told.
Ah, one must tread adown the path of woe
And bury much in many storm accursed,
Curse all that once he would have fondled so,
Despair, and oftentimes in weeping burst. ”

“ If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap corruption; corruption—deterioration, whether of health, of intellect, of character in some shape or other. You know not, and no man knows, what the curse will be like; but the curse will surely come. The thing which is done cannot be undone ”

“ This is what comes to all men who live under the modern curse—the double curse of restlessness and that itching for novelty, which made the old Greek longing for the unknown deity—which is also the only honest prayer of so many fin de siècle souls! ”

“ But each serves quietly, says nothing, and waits patiently the hour when the fairy curse shall be removed, or that unfairy curse resting on all creation, the curse of sin, of Eden, and of man, and they shall have a complete symmetry after the exquisite fragments and indices that each now possesses. ”

“ But what so pure, which envious tongues will spare?
Some wicked wits have libelled all the fair.
With matchless impudence they style a wife45
The dear-bought curse, and lawful plague of life;
A bosom serpent, a domestic evil,
A night invasion, and a mid-day devil.
Let not the wise these sland'rous words regard,
But curse the bones of ev'ry lying bard. ”

“ "Dinna curse him, sir," said the old woman; "I have heard a good man say that a curse was like a stone flung up to the heavens, and maist like to return on the head that sent it. ”

“ This narrative confounds me. I am unable to distinguish truth from falsehood. But do thou advise me. What dost thou think of it? Can a curse such as this is represented to have been—can it have retained its force so long?'
"'Universal nature is one tremendous mystery,' replied the priest; 'who shall decide wherein her power consists? At the best we can but conjecture at her connexion with the world of man—her weaving and working. No one can deny that a solemn curse, spoken with a determined and haughty purpose, has often, on the very instant, accomplished its fulfilment. ”

“ Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds? AARON. Ay, that I had not done a thousand more. Even now I curse the day- and yet, I think, Few come within the compass of my curse- Wherein I did not some notorious ill; As kill a man, or else devise his death; Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it; Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself; Set deadly enmity between two friends; Make poor men's cattle break their necks; Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night, And bid the owners quench them with their tears. ”

“ I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment. ”

“ On thee be the curse that follows the traitor! On thee be the curse that smites him who outrages the Majesty of the Gods! Unhappy shalt thou live, in blood and misery shalt thou die, and in misery shalt thou be tormented for ever and for ever! ”

“ How could He not know the day, Who hath declared both the season of Judgment to come, and the cause? [6] A curse, then, He was made not in respect of His Godhead, but of His flesh; for it is written: “Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” [7] In and after the flesh, therefore, He hung, and for this cause He, Who bore our curses, became a curse. ”

“ I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. ”

“ Thy curse being laid on him, makes thee accurst.
Dea.Let losers talk: yet thou shalt die;
These arms shall crush thee. Chr. Spare not, do thy worst.
I shall be one day better then before:
Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more. ”

“ Struck through her like the Avenger's spear.
[Pg 165]
O saddest sight beneath its light,
That humbled, suffering creature!
For all too heavy lay the doom
Upon her human nature
The curse of sin that none forego,
The agony, the pain, the strife,
The sullied soul, the wasted life
Sin's endless heritage of woe.
She prayed as only those can pray
Who pray to be forgiven;
She wept as only those can weep
Who fear to forfeit Heaven. ”

“ Whatever day any are tempted to curse, let them at the same time bestow one curse upon my birth-day, particularly those that make it their trade to raise up mourning at funerals with their ditties of lamentation. ”

“ And therefore it is that to the household perfidy, in all lands, in all ages, God’s curse seems to cleave, and to God’s curse man abandons it; he does not honour it by hate, still less will he lighten and share the guilt by descending to revenge. He turns aside with a sickness and loathing, and leaves Nature to purify from the earth the ghastly phenomenon she abhors. ”

“ They shall fall and lie under the curse of God: I will send a curse upon you. The wrath of God shall be revealed against them, according to the threatenings of the written word. Note, Those who violate the commands of the law lay themselves under the curses of the law. 2. Neither their employments nor their enjoyments, as priests, shall be clean to them: " I will curse your blessings, so that you shall neither be blessed yourselves nor blessings to the people, but even your plenty shall be a plague to you and you shall be plagues to your generation." ”

“ God's curse comes with a warrant to break open doors, and cannot be kept out by bars or locks. There where the sinner is most secure, and thinks himself out of danger,—there where he promises himself refreshment by food and sleep,—there, in his own house, shall the curse of God seize him; nay, it shall fall not upon him only, but upon all about him for his sake. Cursed shall be his basket and his store, and cursed the fruit of his body, Deut. ”

“ Let God's curse come into his bowels like water and swell him as with a dropsy, and let it soak like oil into his bones. The word of the curse is quick and powerful, and divides between the joints and the marrow; it works powerfully and effectually; it fastens on the soul; it is a piercing thing, and there is no antidote against it. Let is compass him on every side as a garment, v. 19. Let God's cursing him be his shame, as his cursing his neighbour was his pride ”

“ How sad it is, that the serpent's curse should be the covetous worldling's choice, whose character it is, that they pant after the dust of the earth! Amos 2. 7. These choose their own delusions, and so shall their doom be. (2.) He is to be for ever looked upon as a venomous noxious creature, and a proper object of hatred and detestation: I will put enmity between thee and the woman. The inferior creatures being made for man, it was a curse upon any of them, to be turned against man, and man against them; and this is part of the serpent's curse. ”

“ I. The equity of this curse. It is not a curse causeless, nor for some light cause; God seeks not occasion against us, nor is he apt to quarrel with us. That which is here mentioned as bringing the curse is, 1. Despising God, refusing to hearken to his voice (v. 15) , which bespeaks the highest contempt imaginable, as if what he said were not worth the heeding, or we were not under any obligation to him. ”

“ But to touch upon this curse, it lieth in deprivation of all good, and in a being swallowed up of all the most fearful miseries that a holy, and just, and eternal God can righteously inflict, or lay upon the soul of a sinful man. ”

“ Cursed—always blood—and witchery—you cannot get rid of it—the thought of Hell—and the faces of your dead who died foully—your disfigured dead—and your child slaying your child—both damned—and singeing in Hell! ”

“ and as they worked, they cursed us—not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us—good, substantial curses. ”