74 Quotes About Faust

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.

I am Profusion; I am Posey: the Poet 'I' .. " --Boy Charioteer/Goethe's Faust Pt II

Faust tends not to have happy endings.

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.

How to please the public - that's the test,But nowadays I find I'm in a fix;I know they're not accustomed to the best,But they've all read so much they know the tricks.How can we give then something fresh and newThat's serious, but entertaining too?

By Fortune's adverse buffets overborneTo solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,And not in utter loneliness to live,Myself at last did to the Devil give!

The adjective “Faustian” describes the insatiable striving for the unattainable, the impossible, for all knowledge and all power, for the infinite and perfect. The Faustian human will bow to no tyrant God. He will worship no God. He will never be a slave, servant or serf. He will have no lord and no master. Religious people regard Faust as having “sold his soul to the Devil”. In fact, Faust liberated his soul from the Devil (the Abrahamic God) so that he himself could become a God.

... the lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.

Thus, Marlowe posed the silent question: could aspiring Icarus be happy with a toilsome life on land managing a plough with plodding oxen having once tasted the weightless bliss of flight?