Top 40 Faust Quotes & Sayings

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...

The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. --Faust 1, lines 182-3

Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I'd like to do roles like Julie in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust and Teresa in Cradle Song.

Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.

All literature is a footnote to Faust. I have no idea what I mean by that.

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.

You received the power, the authority, and the sacred duty to minister the moment you were ordained to the priesthood. President James E. Faust taught, “Priesthood is the authority delegated to man to minister in the name of God. “The Aaronic Priesthood holds the keys of the ministering of angels. As you love His children, Heavenly Father will guide you, and angels will assist you. You will be given power to bless lives and rescue souls.

My dear young friends, I speak to you as one who stands on the edge of eternity. From that perspective, I see you as the choicest spirits ever placed on the earth. The promises in your generation's patriarchal blessings, if you are faithful, seem to exceed the promises in Sister Faust's blessing and in mine. ...I want you to know that I believe in you. I believe you can be in the world but not of the world.

Faust: Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, He hardly will be caught a second time.

For those of you who thought F. W. Murnau's 'Nosferatu' was his greatest film, I have news for you: his 'Faust' blows it out of the water.

I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Upon the publication of Goethe's epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy.

Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.

Hegel understood the Heisenbergian reality of knowing: yes, it would be nice if we could somehow delicately capture the truth and bring it closer to ourselves without altering it, "like a bird caught with a limestick." But the reality is, every truth we manage to know is altered, deformed by our very "encheiresis naturae," by the act of our taking-in-hand of nature (to borrow the alchemists' phrase from Goethe's Faust).

Faust seems to have exerted a big influence on Star Wars. You know, the "give up your soul for immortality" or something.

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.

Judas sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver; Faust sold his for some extra years of youth; Marilyn Monroe deserted Jesus Christ for Arthur Miller.

For me, the iPhone is harder than reading Faust.

Dante can be understood only within the context of Italian thought, and Faust would be unthinkable if divorced from its German background; but both are part of our common cultural heritage.

Oh, happy he who still hopes he can emerge from Error's boundless sea! - Faust.

Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will... Each hour is precious.

In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is-Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future.

I didn't want to make a record that was just guitar and voice, that was just the technology available to me. At the time, I remember thinking, "I am making a Faust album." That didn't translate.

My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain... For as long as I live, no woman will ever look on me in love.

There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.

Besides writing, I have been teaching myself to 'develop' my own photographic plates, and I haven't a stick of clothing or an exposed finger that isn't stained. I sit for hours in a dark-room feeling as if I were a very elderly Faust at some dreadful incantation, and come out of it, blinding at the light, like a Bastille prisoner. And yet I am not successful!

I definitely have a Luddite's approach to what's going on. I find that as I get older, I get stupider. For me, the iPhone is harder than reading Faust. I've been hanging out a bit with Lou Reed, and he's the complete opposite. He's into technology and is kind of like a toddler, compared to me, who's like an old 19th-century widow or something.

Duane lived life right on the edge. If you ever read Goethe's Faust, Duane Allman was very much that kind of figure. His deal with Mephistopheles was to experience everything life has to offer, good and bad.

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan.

Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He's responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from 'Nosferatu' to 'Faust' to 'Sunset.'

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

Faust was this mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. The Japanese have made that Faustian bargain because they don't have coal, oil or hydro power.

My favorite record shop was called Recommended Records, in South London near where I lived - they did all the original Faust reissues that came out in 1979, and they also did a lot of Sun Ra stuff. They were a great record shop.

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

Victor Faust did much more than help me escape a life of abuse and servitude. He changed me. He changed the landscape of my dreams, the dreams I had every day about living ordinarily and free and on my own. He changed the colors on the palette from primary to rainbow—as dark as the colors of that rainbow may be.

Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.

The Metropolitan Opera, of course, is the gold standard in opera. The Met experience includes the huge stage, the vast audience, the elaborate sets. Anyone who saw 'Faust' there - I did - knows exactly what hell is like, complete with fire, smoke and terror.