Mephistopheles Faust Quotes

All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.

I am the spirit that negates. And rightly so, for all that comes to be Deserves to perish wretchedly; 'Twere better nothing would begin. Thus everything that that your terms, sin, Destruction, evil represent— That is my proper element.

If I wasn't a devil myself I'd give Me up to the Devil this very minute.

I am part of the part that once was everything, Part of the darkness which gave birth to light… Mephistopheles, from Faust.

Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki...

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. ...Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, "Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity?" Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us: Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine. Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.

When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.

Dust shall he eat, and greedily, like my celebrated serpent-cousin

Faust: Nun gut wer bist du denn? Mephistopheles: Ein Theil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.

THE WITCH. [dancing]. O I shall lose my wits, I fear, Do I, again, see Squire Satan here! MEPHISTOPHELES. Woman, the name offends my ear! THE WITCH. Why so? What has it done to you? MEPHISTOPHELES. It has long since to fable-books been banished; But men are none the better for it; true, The wicked one, but not the wicked ones, has vanished.

THE LORD. You've nothing more to say to me? You come but to complain unendingly? Is never aught right to your mind? MEPHISTOPHELES. No, Lord! All is still downright bad, I find.

Men grieve [Mephistopheles] so with the days of their lamenting, [he] even hate[s] to plague them with [his] torments.

A part of that Power that, always wishing for Evil, only knows how to do Good. -Mephistopheles

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe’s Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain. . . . I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust’s error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done.

I sit here like a monarch on his throne I've got my sceptre, but no crown to call my own -Mephistopheles

FAUST You seem to like eavesdropping. MEPHISTOPHELES I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.

My one regret is that my own knowledge of European literature at that time was too shallow to inform him that there is also a poodle at the centre of Goethe’s Faust (the diabolical Mephistopheles first appears to Faust in the form of a giant, shaggy, black poodle).

I am the spirit of perpetual negation. (Mephistopheles)

We do not sufficiently respect that anti-mephistoclean force which, like the mephistoclean one, threatens the balance of life: a force that constantly wishes what is good and constantly produces what is evil.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Note that madam! That’s Lilith. FAUST: Who? MEPHISTOPHELES: First wife to Adam. Pay attention to her lovely hair, [4120] The only adornment she need wear. When she traps a young man in her snare, She won’t soon let him from her care.

Hast thou, then, nothing more to mention? Com'st ever, thus, with ill intention? Find'st nothing right on earth, eternally? MEPHISTOPHELES No, Lord! I find things, there, still bad as they can be. Man's misery even to pity moves my nature; I've scarce the heart to plague the wretched creature.

The Lord. Hast nothing for our edification? Still thy old work of accusation? Will things on earth be never right for thee? Mephistopheles. No, Lord! I find them still as bad as bad can be. Poor souls! their miseries seem so much to please ‘em, I scarce can find it in my heart to tease ’em. The Lord. Knowest thou Faust?

-what good for us this endless creating? / what is created - then annihilating? \ '& now IT'S PAST'!.. '" --Mephistopheles (Faust; Pt II)

Poor little Margaret, no hope for you when Faust and Mephistopheles are one.

The devil doesn't always laugh. Sometimes, he weeps with you.

Zur moralischen Aufklärung. —Man muß den Deutschen ihren Mephistopheles ausreden: und ihren Faust dazu. Es sind zwei moralische Vorurteile gegen den Wert der Erkenntnis.

Mit Frauen soll man sich nie unterstehn zu scherzen." - Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles: Yet future poets’ verse will stress The splendour of your bright success, And inspire fools to foolishness.

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall [...].

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul.

That is no casual thing: a special preference for Mephistopheles. He was especially fond of Mephistopheles’s line from Faust: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”79 This is no surprise; it reflects the very thinking of the man who in letters called for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists,”80 who in the Manifesto declared that communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things,” and who at the close of the Manifesto called for “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

[The Devil] Mephistopheles, when he comes to Faust, testifies of himself that he desires evil, yet does only good. Well, let him do as he likes, it's quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the only man in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good.

Mephistopheles' contentious, often ambiguous relationship to Faustus is a reference to tantra just as it is to alchemy. It resembles the shifting tactics of a guru who varies his approach to his pupil in order to dissolve his resistances and prepare him for wider states of consciousness. Both Faustus and the tantric aspirant stimulate and indulge their senses under the guidance of their teachers who encourage them to have sexual encounters with women in their dreams. Both work with magical diagrams or yantras, exhibit extraordinary will, "fly" on visionary journeys, acquire powers of teleportation, invisibility, prophecy, and healing, and have ritual intercourse with women whom they visualize as goddesses. The tantrist [sic] is said to become omniscient as a result of his sacred "marriage," and Faustus produces an omniscient child in his union with the visualized Helen, or Sophia.

if you’ll let me hijack your feed for one second, I think we could help each other. The voice was chemical-sweet, carcinogenic, a pool of oily promise cooking in a silver spoon. Its silky bravado reminded Deirdre of stories about devils and demons, about dark fae spirits feasting on firstborn children after a handshake and a trick.

MEPHISTOPHELES: What dreary, stale employment to keep watch on a philosopher! [...] These logicians are distrustful souls. One works like a spider around their cold brains to catch them in the web of dialectic, but the result is that they kick and catch the devil in threads of their own making. They use chicanery to resist the master who taught it to them! This one uses demonstrative reason to arrive at faith, and what ruins others saves him from my claws. You are a mystical pedant who gives me more pain than did your ancestor, Faust. [...] Behold, philosophers who want at one and the same time to understand and to feel. If we let them get away with it, man will slip between our fingers quickly enough. Hola, my masters! Believe and be absurd, we agree to that; but don’t complicate it by trying both to believe and to be wise.

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.

A good literary example of such a man is Faust at the beginning of the tragedy. The other components of his personality approach him in the shape of the poodle, and later as Mephistopheles. Although Mephistopheles, as is perfectly clear from many of his associations, also represents the sexual complex, it would in my view be a mistake to explain him as a split-off complex and declare that he is nothing but repressed sexuality. This explanation is too narrow, because Mephistopheles is far more than sexuality—he is also power; in fact, he is practically the whole life of Faust, barring that part of it which is taken up with thinking and research. The result of the pact with the devil makes this very evident. What undreamt-of possibilities of power unfold themselves before the rejuvenated Faust! The correct explanation, therefore, would seem to be that Faust identified with one function and got split off as Mephistopheles from his personality as a whole. Subsequently, Wagner the thinker also gets split off from Faust.

Speer’s moral corruption had its seed in his emotional attachment to Hitler–he likened it to Faust’s fatal bargain with Mephistopheles. Achievement and success rooting it ever deeper over the years, he lived–almost addictively–in an increasingly vicious cycle of need and dependence.

The well was now belching smoke, illuminated from some hellfire below, and for one breathless moment Boswell was reminded of Faust, and the hush that descends before Mephistopheles himself emerges from a hidden trapdoor centre stage.

For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's.

Literally sold his soul? Like, ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ Robert Johnson at the crossroads—” “Like Mephistopheles and your namesake, or the violinist Niccolò Paganini, or the Rolling Stones, yes, exactly.” She paused. “Forget I said that last one.

Literary theory, especially, cast its lot with a spirit of ceaseless skepticism and incessant interrogation; modeling itself on Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, it was “der Geist, der stets verneint”—the spirit that always negates.

Mephistopheles and Gretchen from Faust.

Auerbachs Keller, the bar to which Mephistopheles brings Faust in the fifth scene of Goethe’s play.