Faustian Legend Quotes

“Sunshine, if I ever disappear, please tell people that I ran after the Devil, trying to get my soul back.”
― April Genevieve Tucholke, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

“What you inherit from your father
must first be earned before it's yours.”
― Goethe

“Being full of mischief, they love to listen;
they gladly obey, for they like to betray you,
pretending to be sent from Heaven,
and lisping like angels, while they lie.”
― Goethe

“When he comes to the door
he always looks mocking and half-way angry.
You can see he has sympathy for nothing.
It's written on his forehead
that he can love no one.”
― Goethe

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

“In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World, Vol. 1

“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.”
― Ramona Fradon, The Gnostic Faustus

“As everybody knows, the Faustian bargain has had a long and rich career. It is not solely an emblem of Humanist pride, it is a great western myth. To "fly among the stars" stands for the restless discontent with mere humanness and for any aspiration so lofty that to fulfill it Man is willing to barter his most precious possession.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present