Doctor Faustus Quotes

Make me immortal with a kiss.

He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.

Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.

What art thou Faustus, but a man condemned to die?

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates through it.

What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.

I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!

Man is mortal. This is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances.

To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.

You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.

Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.

But admiration and sadness, admiration and worry, is not that almost a definition of love?" "There are people with whom it is not easy to live, but whom it is impossible to leave.

Even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air      Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;      Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter      When he appear'd to hapless Semele;      More lovely than the monarch of the sky      In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms Excerpt From: Christopher Marlowe. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.

boredom is the coldest thing in the world.

Art, in its will to live and progress, puts on the mask of these dull-hearted personal traits in order to manifest, objectivize, and fulfill itself in them.

Wagner Doctor Faustus' student and servant: "Alas, poor slave! See how poverty jests in his nakedness. I know the villain's out of service, and so hungry that I know he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it were blood raw." Robin a clown: "Not so, neither! I had need to have it well roasted, and good sauce to it, if I pay so dear, I can tell you.

Bei einem Volk von der Art des unsrigen”, trug ich vor, “ist das Seelische immer das Primäre und eigentlich Motivierende; die politische Aktion ist zweiter Ordnung, Reflex, Ausdruck, Instrument.

These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they live, and they therefore see in it nothing more than an indifferent framework for life, either more or less favorable to production.

İblis: "Müzik her ne kadar Hristiyanlık tarafından kullanılıp geliştirilse de, aynı zamanda reddedildi ve şeytani bir alan olarak dışlandı-işte görüyorsun. Müzik fevkalade teolojik bir mesele; tıpkı günah gibi, benim gibi...

All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings Are but obey'd in their several provinces, Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man! A sound magician is a mighty god.

Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas; If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there's no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so consequently die: Ay, we must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,19 What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!

Aber für ihn war Musik - Musik, wenn es eben nur welche war, und gegen das Wort von Goethe: 'Die Kunst beschäftigt sich mit dem Schweren und Guten' fand er einzuwenden, daß das Leichte auch schwer ist, wenn es gut ist, was es ebensowohl sein kann wie das Schwere. Davon ist etwas bei mir hängengeblieben, ich habe es von ihm. Allerdings habe ich ihn immer dahin verstanden, daß man sehr sattelfest sein muß im Schweren und Guten, um es so mit dem Leichten aufzunehmen.

By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the the universe

Is not all the power on Earth bestowed on us {the Pope}, even if we wanted to, can do no wrong?

The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one’s present impotence.

There are people with whom it is not easy to live, but whom it is impossible to leave.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves . . . Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

I once got hit by revolving scenery in a production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. It whacked my hip, bruised my ego, got an unintentional laugh, but the show went on, and it still does.

A greater subject fitteth Faustus' wit: Bid Economy10 farewell, and11 Galen come, Seeing, Ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus: Be a physician, Faustus; heap up gold, And be eterniz'd for some wondrous cure: Summum bonum medicinae sanitas, The end of physic is our body's health.

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today.

›Nun, Neffe, was man da heut von dir hörte, darin hast du dich nicht zum ersten Male geübt.‹ ›Wie meinst du, Onkel Niko?‹ ›Wende nicht Unschuld vor! Du musizierst ja.‹ ›Was für ein Ausdruck!‹ ›Der hat schon für Dümmeres herhalten müssen [...].‹

Leider sei eben heute alles Politik, es gebe keine geistige Reinheit mehr.

closing movement of the Cello Sonata in D, Op.

Есть люди, с которыми нелегко жить, но которых невозможно покинуть.

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.

«Lo que ahora quieres saber, siempre acabarás por averiguarlo demasiado pronto».

Be silent then, for danger is in words.

Свобода сама себе внутренне противоречит, поскольку вынуждена, самоутверждаясь, ограничивать свободу своих противников, а стало быть, отменять самое себя.

Let no one tell me nothing is being communicated here! For the message to be inaccessible, and for one to immerse oneself in that contradiction—that also has its pleasure.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, but where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be.

In 1593, soon after Marlowe’s murder, a troop of English actors brought a production of the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus to Germany. Through some metamorphosis, the tragedy became a comedy, and the comedy was then transformed into a puppet show. It was more than likely in this form that the young Goethe first came upon what would become his most famous work.

Oh, Fausto, ahora tienes apenas una hora de vida, y serás maldecido para la eternidad. ¡Quedaos quietas, esferas celestiales siempre en movimiento, que el tiempo pare y no llegue nunca la medianoche!

Dennoch gibt es etwas, was einige von uns in Augenblicken, die ihnen selbst as verbrecherisch erscheinen, andere aber frank und permanent, mehr fürchten als die deutsche Niederlage, und das ist der deutsche Sieg.

No meu íntimo dirijo perguntas ao mundo que me cerca, e, escutando, aguardo que se me indique um lugar que me permita enterrar-me longe de todos e, sem que ninguém perturbe, dialogar com minha vida e meu destino...

Art's vital need for revolutionary progress and achievement of the new depends on the vehicle of the strongest subjective sense for what is hackneyed, for what has nothing more to say, for those standard, normal means that have now become 'impossible'.

Die wissenschaftliche Überlegenheit der liberalien Theologie, heißt es nun, sei zwar unbestreitbar, aber ihre theologische Position sei schwach, denn ihrem Moralismus und Humanismus mangle die Einsicht in den dämonischen Charakter der meschlichen Existenz.

Am Schluß eines damals verfaßten, auch ins Englische übersetzten 'Lebensabrisses' hatte ich im halb spielerischen Glauben an gewisse Symmetrien und Zahlenentsprechungen in meinem Leben die ziemlich bestimmte Vermutung geäußert, daß ich im Jahre 1945, siebzigjährig, im selben Alter also wie meine Mutter, das Zeitliche segnen würde. Das ins Auge gefaßte Jahr, sagte der Mann, sei so gut wie abgelaufen, ohne daß ich Wort gehalten hätte. Wie ich es vor der Öffentlichkeit rechtfertigen wolle, daß ich immer noch am Leben sei.

That music is ambiguity as a system. Take this note or this one. You can understand it like this or, again, like this, can perceive it as augmented from below or as diminished from above, and, being the sly fellow you are, you can make use of its duplicity just as you like.

However opinionated, perhaps even high-handed his presentations were, he was unquestionably an ingenious man--that was evident in the stimulating, thought-provoking effect his words had on a highly gifted young mind like Adri Leverkühn's. What had chiefly impressed him, as he revealed on the way home and the following day in the schoolyard, was the distinction Kretzschmar had made between cultic and cultural epochs and his observation that the secularization of art, its separation from worship, was of only a superficial and episodic nature. The high-school sophomore was manifestly moved by an idea that the lecturer had not even articulated, but that had caught fire in him:: that the separation of art from any liturgical context, its liberation and elevation to the isolated and personal, to culture for culture's sake, had burdened it with a solemnity without any point of reference, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering epitomized in Beethoven's terrible appearance in the doorway--but that did not have to be its abiding destiny, its perpetual state of mind. Just listen to the young man! With almost no real, practical experience in the field of art, he was fantasizing in a void and in precocious words about art's apparently imminent retreat from its present-day role to a happier, more modest one in the service of a higher fellowship, which did not have to be, as at one time, the Church. What it would be, he could not say.

ceea ce te’nalta, ceea ce iti sporeste sentimentul de putere si vigoare si dominare, la dracu asta’i adevarul – chiar daca vazut din punctul de vedere al moralei ar fi de zece ori minciuna. ce vreau sa spun este ca un neadevar de natura a produce o sporire a puterii se poate masura cu orice adevar virtuos dar sterp.

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature. "A gift of life," I responded, "if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love them." "Do you believe love is the strongest emotion?" he asked. "Do you know any stronger?" "Yes, interest." "By which you probably mean a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, is that it?" "Let's agree on that definition!" he said with a laugh. "Good night!" We had arrived again at the Leverkühn house, and he opened his front door.

It seems to me, however, that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.

Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers, quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines, she has other names, but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.

...music has always seemed a magical union of theology and the fine sport of mathematics. Item: There is about it a great deal of the dogged pursuit and laboratory work of the alchemist and sorcerer of ages past, which likewise stood under the sign of theology, but at the same time under that of emancipation and apostasy--and it was apostasy, not from the faith, that was not possible, but rather in the faith. Apostasy is an act of faith, and everything is and happens in God--falling away from Him most especially.

But a man of tender sensitivities finds disruption unpleasant; he finds it unpleasant to break in on a well-constructed train of thought with his own logical or historical objections culled from memory, and even in the anti-intellectual he will honor and respect the intellect. Today we can see clearly enough that it was the mistake of our civilization to have been all too generous in exercising such forbearance and respect—since on the opposing side we were indeed dealing with naked insolence and the most determined intolerance.

Öyle bir zamandayız ki, doğru adımlarla, inançla ve sadelikle hiçbir şekilde bir yere varılmıyor. Şeytan'ın yardımı olmaksızın, kazanın altında cehennem ateşi yanmaksızın sanat yapmak imkânsız... Evet, sevgili dostlar, evet, sanatın duraklaması, zorlaşması, her şey zorlaştı diye kendini sarakaya alması, Tanrı'nın zavallı kullarının çaresizlik içinde ne yapacağını bilememesi, zamanın suçu. Birileri bunu aşmak, bir atılım yapmak üzere misafir olarak iblisi davet etmişse eğer, ruhunu günaha teslim etmişse, zamanın günahını kendi sırtına yüklemiş olur ve lanetlenir.

Feci per uscire, ma egli mi trattenne, chiamandomi col cognome: – Zeitblom! – e anche questo richiamo fu duro. Quando mi volsi, disse: – Ho trovato che non dev’essere. – Che cosa, Adrian, non dev’essere? – Ciò che è buono e nobile, – mi rispose – ciò che si dice umano, benché sia buono e nobile. Ciò per cui gli uomini hanno combattuto, per cui hanno dato l’assalto alle rocche, ciò che i vincitori hanno annunciato trionfanti, ecco, non deve essere. Viene ritirato. Io lo voglio ritirare. – Scusa, caro, non ti comprendo del tutto. Che cosa vuoi ritirare? – La Nona Sinfonia – rispose. E non disse altro, per quanto io stessi aspettando.

Io ero convinto che Ines non si sarebbe mai innamorata di Schwerdtfeger se Institoris. l’aspirante alla sua mano, non fosse entrato nella sua vita. Egli le faceva la corte, ma in certo qual modo gliela faceva per un altro. Mediocre com’era, poteva bensì con le sue attenzioni e coi pensieri che gli erano associati svegliare in lei la donna: fin lì arrivava; ma non poteva svegliarla per sé, quantunque per ragionamento ella fosse disposta a seguirlo: fin qui non arrivava. La femminilità in lei ridesta si volse infatti subito a un altro per il quale la sua coscienza aveva nutrito fino allora soltanto sentimenti pacati e semifraterni, mentre ora altri sentimenti sorgevano in lei.

Es ist nur ärgerlich – wenn du es nicht erfreulich nennen willst -, dass es in der Musik – Wenigstens in der Musik – Dinge gibt, für die im ganzen Bereich der Sprache beim besten Willen kein wirklich charakterisierendes Beiwort, auch keine Kombination von Beiworten aufzutreiben ist. Ich habe mich dieser Tage damit geplagt, - du findest keine adäquate Bezeichnung für den Geist, die Haltung, die Gebärde dieses Themas. Denn es ist viel Gebärde darin. Tragisch-kühn? Trotzig, emphatisch, das Elanhafte ins Erhabene getrieben? Alles nicht gut. Und ‚herrlich‘! Ist natürlich nur eine alberne Kapitulation. Man landet zuletzt bei der sachlichen Vorschrift, dem Namen: Allegro appassionato, das ist noch das Beste.

Cierto que, en manos de un solista, puede convertirse, como cualquier otro instrumento, en un pretexto de virtuosismo, pero eso es sólo uno de sus aspectos y, a decir verdad, un abuso. Visto como debe ser, el piano es el representante directo y soberano de la música misma considerada en su intelectualidad, y es así como hay que aprenderlo. La enseñanza del piano no debe ser, o no debe ser esencialmente, en primer y último lugar, la enseñanza de una especial habilidad, sino la enseñanza de la... Y como el orador quedara cortado súbitamente y su lengua de tartamudo se trabara ante esta última palabra, tantas veces dicha, una voz de entre el escaso público completó la frase gritando: –Música. –Usted lo ha dicho –contestó Kretzschmar.

«El arte progresa —escribía Kretzschmar—, y progresa gracias a la personalidad que es a la vez producto e instrumento de su tiempo y en la cual se conjugan hasta identificarse e intercambiar sus formas lo subjetivo y lo objetivo. El progreso revolucionario, la gestación de la novedad son necesidades vitales del arte, que sólo pueden verse satisfechas por el vehículo de un subjetivismo lo bastante fuerte para rechazar los valores tradicionales, para comprender su agotamiento. El cansancio, el tedio intelectual, el asco por los procedimientos conocidos, el maldito impulso de ver las cosas iluminadas por su propia parodia, el sentido de lo cómico, son el recurso de que el arte se sirve para manifestarse objetivamente y realizar su esencia…»

Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants. If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.

This was in fact the book's crude and intriguing prophecy: that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle of political action--fables, chimeras, phantasms that needed to have nothing whatever to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive nonetheless, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities. ...It made it possible to understand that truth's fate was closely related to that of the individual, indeed identical with it--and that fate was devaluation. The book opened a sardonic rift between truth and power, truth and life, truth and community. Its implicit message was that community deserved far greater precedence, that truth's goal was community, and that whoever wished to be part of the community must be prepared to jettison major portions of truth and science, to make the sacrificium intellectus.

He remained seated on his revolving stool, turned toward us, hands between his knees, in a position the same as ours, and with a few words concluded his lecture on the question of why Beethoven had not written a third movement to Opus 111. We had needed only to hear the piece, he said, to be able to answer the question ourselves. A third movement? A new beginning, after that farewell? A return — after that parting? Impossible! What had happened was that the sonata had found its ending in its second, enormous movement, had ended never to return. And when he said, “the sonata,” he did not mean just this one, in C minor, but he meant the sonata per se, as a genre, as a traditional artform — it had been brought to an end, to its end, had fulfilled its destiny, reached a goal beyond which it could not go; canceling and resolving itself, it had taken its farewell - the wave of goodbye from the D-G-G motif, consoled melodically by the C-sharp, was a farewell in that sense, too, a farewell as grand as the work, a farewell from the sonata.

broad sense, let me say, however, that the similarities far outweigh the differences. In both, our Doctor Faustus summons the demon Mephistopheles from the underworld and strikes a pact to have twenty-four years on Earth with Mephistopheles as his personal servant. In exchange he gives his soul over to Lucifer as payment and damns himself to an eternity in Hell. At the end of these twenty-four rather excellent and sinful years, though filled with fear and remorse, there’s nothing Faustus can do to alter his fate. He’s torn limb from limb and his soul is carried off to Hell.

He was also at the Orcades behind Scotland, where he saw the tree that bringeth forth fruit, that when it is ripe, openeth and falleth in the water, wherein engendereth a certain kind of fowl and birds. These islands are in number twenty-three, but ten of them are not habitable, the other thirteen were inhabited.

Creating art allows us to beat the odds and find immortality, without having to do the whole Doctor Faustus thing. Though Brian Wilson and Mike Love no longer collaborate and Carl and Dennis Wilson are gone, they are all still together on the radio late at night, where they join voices and are young and golden and beautiful forever.

Dr. Faustus said we should go one at a time and see the results of each.” “I don’t care what the doctor said! Give them to me. Now!