"Mephistopheles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Tombs, is different. He maintains that the two cats are one and the same, and that the body of the beast is occupied by that ubiquitous spirit who is variously known as Satan, Hornie, Cloots, Mephistopheles, Pluto, and ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... looked at this man playing bowls in the gardens of the ministry with the minister's children, they cracked their brains to guess the secret of his influence and the nature of his services; while, on the other hand, the aristocrats in all the various ministries looked upon him as a dangerous Mephistopheles, courted him, and gave him back with usury the flatteries he bestowed in the higher sphere. As difficult to decipher as a hieroglyphic inscription to the clerks, the vocation of the secretary and his usefulness were as plain as the rule of three to the self-interested. This lesser Prince de Wagram ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... Mephistopheles in scarlet silk, whose high shoulders lent him added height, had joined them. His peaked cap and feather sparkled with lurid points of fire. Countess Sagan turned ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... high sounding. Besides she's just like Mephistopheles in 'Faust.' She doesn't speak right out, only whispers and suggests. Innuendo is the word, isn't it? Sometimes ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... spirits.] Satan — N. Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Ahriman^, Belial; Samael, Zamiel, Beelzebub, the Prince of the Devils. the tempter; the evil one, the evil spirit; the Adversary; the archenemy; the author of evil, the wicked one, the old Serpent; the Prince of darkness, the Prince of this world, the Prince of the power of the air; the foul ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... been confessed Within these latest thousand years or later. Perhaps the fine old fellow spoke in jest:— For my part, I am but a mere spectator, And gaze where'er the palace or the hovel is, Much in the mode of Goethe's Mephistopheles; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... among other works, had written the greater part of a novel. This book, written under the influence of his youthful embarrassments, amatory and pecuniary, was of a very fierce, gloomy and passionate sort—the Byronic despair, the Wertherian despondency, the mocking bitterness of Mephistopheles of Faust, were all reproduced and developed in the character of the hero; for our youth had just been learning the German language, and imitated, as almost all clever lads do, his favorite poets and writers. Passages in the volumes once so loved, and ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... looser seat. He rolled about like a tipsy man, holding on, in fact, far more by his spurs than by his knees, to the utter infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers, who kicked and snorted over the down like one of Mephistopheles's Demon-steeds. They had mounted the hill—the deer fled before them in terror—they neared the park palings. In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their fox, struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... the superior gusto with which the Eastern, as well as the Western tale-teller describes his scoundrels and villains whilst his good men and women are mostly colourless and unpicturesque. So Satan is the true hero of Paradise-Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary; and Mephistopheles is much better society than Faust ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... are powerless to reveal the torments of the imprisoned in a modern steel inquisition, rocking and pitching at the mercy of mighty torrents in a mid-ocean cyclone. Mephistopheles, seeking severest punishment for the damned, displayed tenderness in not adopting the super-heated and sooted pits where stokers in storms at sea are forced ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... mocking, lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness; and when he has burst forth as he does constantly with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls on his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, which on the right temple is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl." ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... Goethe will remember the trustful docility of the student received by Doctor Mephistopheles in the First Part of Faust, and the very different demeanour of the same student when he reappears, in the Second Part, as Baccalaureus. More than one foreign professor in Japan must have been reminded of that contrast by personal experience, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... from Paris; in Rome you caused me to be starved and robbed by Luigi Vampa and his brigands; then with the malevolent magnanimity of an arch-demon you sent me forth into the world a fugitive and an outcast. Count of Monte-Cristo, Edmond Dantes, low-born sailor of Marseilles, modern Mephistopheles as you are, I will be even with you! You have had your vengeance; now you shall feel mine! Here in the Grecian Archipelago, on the Island of Salmis, I will torture you through your dearest affections, and grind you to dust beneath ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yes! the world had the heart to go on, to bud and build, and sing,—though Jenny was gone. And in that bright spring, see horrible and useless age still hobbling out into the beam! What was life but one huge Mephistopheles laugh beneath the windows of ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... found in the Symphonic Poems, more nearly resembles the ordinary symphony in that it is in three distinct movements—with pauses between—which stand, respectively, for the three chief characters in Goethe's drama: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. In the Faust Symphony the principle of transformation or metamorphosis of themes is of such importance that it may be defined as their rhythmic, melodic and harmonic modification for the purpose of changing the meaning to correspond with a modification in the characters for which they stand. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... with a very discontented look. His marked behaviour seemed to afford the Major (who was all politeness in his recognition of Miss Tox) unbounded satisfaction; and he sat for a long time afterwards, leering, and choking, like an over-fed Mephistopheles. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of taking refuge in a supernatural realm, of appealing to invisible powers, which plunged him, for a considerable time, into the dreams of Illuminati and made him even invent a religion? This irony of Mephistopheles, who carries on so audacious a game with the weakness and the desires of man, is it not the mocking, scornful side of the poet's spirit, a leaning to sullenness, which can be traced even into the earliest ...
— Faust • Goethe
... history, and yet, for a hundred different reasons, it is the part which from the beginning has been most obscured by a miscellaneous conspiracy of silence. Some day perhaps it will be possible to get a true life written of Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau, the millionaire Mephistopheles of Philippe Egalite. The hand that struck him to death in the very centre of the scene of his long machinations, there in the Palais Royal, with his vote, dooming the king to death, still as it were on his lips, did not strike at random. There was no ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... feet, that is to say, by accepting the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma: and then he reascends to the light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous ladder. Faust ascends to Heaven, by stepping on the head of the vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell is impassable for those only who know not how to turn back from it. We free ourselves ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... judge of men. He read their motives, their bad ones especially, with the accuracy of a Mephistopheles, and with the same cold contempt for every trace ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... an upstanding lace collar, and absurd little puffed sleeves. The Englishman was a Puritan, his daughter a Quakeress, Mr. Johnson a Huguenot Lover, Miss Emmeline a Colonial Lady, Doctor Geddes a bearded and belted Boyar, and The Author a painfully realistic Mephistopheles, his eyebrows corked upward and his mustache waxed into points. Mr. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... hypo-chondriacal nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... assailant with a clearness and vigor of argument and a power of style with which few pens could cope. He was not only assailed with the rudest violence of newspaper denunciation, but he was alluded to by Whig speakers in scornful terms, while caricaturists represented him as the Mephistopheles of the Van Buren Administration, and Log Cabin Clubs roared offensive campaign songs at midnight before his house, terrifying his children by the discharges of a small cannon. Defeat stared him in the face, but he never quailed, but faced the storm of attack in every direction, and zealously ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... exchequer of France had been brought into a condition of something very like {184} bankruptcy by the long and wasting war; and a projector was found who promised to supply the deficiency as boldly and as liberally as Mephistopheles does in the second part of "Faust." John Law, a Scotchman, and unquestionably a man of great ability and financial skill, had settled in France in consequence of having fought a duel and killed his man in his own country. [Sidenote: ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... reported as a discovery made by Mephistopheles in Thessaly, in the classical Walpurgisnacht, that the company there was very much like his old acquaintances on the Brocken. A similar discovery, in regard to more honourable personages and other scenes, may be made by other Gothic travellers in a "south-eastward" journey ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... and dabbed at the eyebrow, and added a little to the lobe of the ear to suggest materialism. Further consideration ensued. "Vigil's off, I'm afraid," said Harringay. "Why not Mephistopheles? But that's a bit too common. 'A Friend of the Doge,'—not so seedy. The armour won't do, though. Too Camelot. How about a scarlet robe and call him 'One of the Sacred College'? Humour in that, and an appreciation ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... "grumbling." Why couldn't he be nice— as he used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man, too, nourished mentally on Self-Help, and with a meagre ambition of self-denial and competition, that was to end in a "sufficiency." Then Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling chronicle of "fellers," and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres, and "all that." And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and female) to eat up capital, insult him personally, upset business arrangements, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... entered on board of a man-of-war. Having no name, it was necessary to christen him on the ship's books, and the first lieutenant, who had entered him, struck with his remarkable expression of countenance, and being a German scholar, had named him Mephistopheles Faust, from whence his Christian name had been razeed to Mesty. Mesty in other points was an eccentric character; at one moment, when he remembered his lineage, he was proud to excess, at others he was grave and almost sullen—but when nothing either in daily occurrences ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... with a coquette, you only wish me to be warned in time and make good my escape. If it were light enough, I should see that grizzly moustache of yours curl like a cat's, this minute. You can grin, you amiable Mephistopheles, but I know you! No, my dear Easelmann, I am cured. I shall take hold of my pencils with new energy. I will save money and go abroad, and——I had nearly forgotten her! I will take a new look at my darling's sweet face in my pocket, and, like Ulysses, I'll put ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... first word; and of these latter is Frank Swinnerton. But Frank Swinnerton can be more cruel than Irvin Cobb. Indeed, sometimes when he is telling a story, his face becomes exactly like the face of Mephistopheles in excellent humour with ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... wish to drink your reeking pots of beer, whisky, wine, or other disgusting alcoholic liquors; if you wish to go to the theatre and listen to Mephistopheles, to the devil, to Marguerite, the dissolute hussy, and Doctor Faust, her foul accomplice; if you wish to gorge yourselves upon the oyster, scavenger of the sea, and the pig, scavenger of the earth—a scavenger that there is some question of making use of in the streets ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... powerless. For he knew the guard of the train would jeer too. It is not so easy to interfere with honest third-class Bolognesi in Bologna station, even if they have taken another man's seat. Powerless, his brow knitted, and looking just like Mephistopheles with his high forehead and slightly arched nose, Mephistopheles in a rage, he hauled down Aaron's bag and handed it to Angus. So they transferred themselves to the first-class carriage, while the fat man and his party in the third-class watched ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... the hearer to tears—this wifely faith. Surely the saint that lay behind the Mephistopheles in his face must have as real an existence, if the woman who knew him only as man, undazzled by the glitter of his fame, unwearied by his long sickness, found him ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was hastily completed amongst them: each had a pin to draw from her bosom, in order to put something to rights about my throat or hands; and a chorus of "God bless hims!" was arising, when, from below, young Mephistopheles murmured an impatient groan, and perhaps the horses snorted. I found myself lifted into the chaise; counsels about the night and the cold flowing in upon me, to which Mephistopheles listened with derision or astonishment. I and he had each our separate corner; ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the day's news had presented, even to that last unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of world-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning I was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism, and but yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That strange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know not how long, ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... last understood and followed the example by swinging her arms about awkwardly. A smile of satisfaction curled the lips of her teacher, the smile of a female Mephistopheles who succeeds in getting a great pupil. There were in it hate, disdain, jest, and cruelty; with a burst of demoniacal laughter she ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... at you! Do you know, you're getting a regular Mephistopheles, Spike? Suppose I hadn't an iron will, what would happen? You really must select your subjects of conversation more carefully. You're bad company for the ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... she said, "could understand till now the instinctive dread with which poor Margaret, in Faust, shrinks from the hateful presence of Mephistopheles. I now feel it in myself. The dislike and suspicion I first felt for that man—Smith, or whatever else he may call himself—has grown into literal detestation and terror. I hate him—I am afraid of him—I never ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... ever wrote. The drawings he made for it show specimens of the evolution of various types of devil into various types of humans: the devils themselves are carefully classified—the common or garden serpent (Tentator Hortensis), the red devil (Diabolus Mephistopheles) the blue devil (Caeruleus Lugubrius) etc. Mr. J. Milton's "specimen" is discussed and various methods of pursuing observations in supernatural history which "possesses an interest which will remain after health, youth and even ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification, condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he soon followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it was circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, and nearly all the copies destroyed. A writer could not be thus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... one of the living topazes or golden splendors of the "Paradise"; but is stern, disdainful, silent, waving from before his face all contact with the filthy gloom. His Lucifer is no flickering, gentlemanly, philosophic man of the world like Goethe's Mephistopheles, nor like Milton's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... a pseudo-scientific mountebank, juggler and magician can be traced through various parts of Germany. The Faust Book of 1587, the earliest collection of these tales, is of prevailingly theological character. It represents Faust as a sinner and reprobate, and it holds up his compact with Mephistopheles and his subsequent damnation as an example of human recklessness and as a warning to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was unreasoning and intense. She considered him her father's evil genius, and believed him to be somehow at the bottom of the troubles of her life. Thus every year this man, John Wiggins, grew more hateful, and she accustomed herself to think of him as an evil fiend, a Mephistopheles, by whose crafty wiles her father's heart had been estranged from her. Such, then, was the nature of Edith's bereavement; and as she mourned over it she did not mourn so much over the reality as over her vanished hope. He was gone, and with him was gone the ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... of the United States, Vol. 2, p. 180. "Pickering and Griswold could win their game only by bartering their souls; they must invoke the Mephistopheles of politics, Aaron Burr. To this they had made up their minds from the beginning. Burr's four years of office were drawing to a close. He had not a chance of regaining a commanding place among Republicans, for he was bankrupt in private and public ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Man-in-the-Moon had somehow secretly put up the ships to their contest, and in the depths of his malignant old soul was not unpleased to see how well his charms worked. There stood the grinning Man-in-the-Moon, his head just dodging into view over the rim of the sea:—Mephistopheles ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... dominated ever after by a verbal dogma, around which all your sympathies and antipathies will quickly gather, and the less you have penetrated the original sense of your creed, the more absolutely will you believe it. You will have followed Mephistopheles' ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... ideal of strength, suppleness, and joyous flight, lie nerveless and flaccid at his feet; to be able to call the thicket-like antlers of the splendid animal his own, was for the time the one ambition of Hilary Sercombe; for he was of the brood of Mephistopheles, the child of darkness, whose delight lies in undoing what God has done—the nearest that any evil power ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... irony of life. The defeat of such adversaries as Flore and Max has, of course, the merit of poetical justice and the interest of "diamond cut diamond." But is not the terrible Philippe Bridau, the "Mephistopheles a cheval" of the latter part of the book, rather inconsistent with the common-place ne'er-to-well of the earlier? Not only does it require no unusual genius to waste money, when you have it, in the channels of the drinking-shop, the gaming table, and elsewhere, to sponge for more ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... looked like Mephistopheles, as he glanced around with a triumphant expression on his swarthy face, ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... thought! To see Helen, to see Helen of Greece, was the chief prayer of Marlow's Dr. Faustus; the chief gift which he exacted from the fiend. To see Helen of Greece? Dr. Faustus, we have seen her: Mr. Murray is the Mephistopheles that showed her to us. It was cheap at the price of a journey to Siberia, and is the next best thing to having seen Waterloo at sunset on the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... same disease as Pigasov's,' observed Rudin, 'the desire of being original. One affects to be a Mephistopheles—the other a cynic. In all that, there is much egoism, much vanity, but little truth, little love. Indeed, there is even calculation of a sort in it. A man puts on a mask of indifference and indolence so that some one will be sure to think. "Look ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... Cicero and Virgil, are such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense obsoleteness,—Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have recommended in irony to the student who sought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... but a Note at the end of the Volume informs me that a much greater Wit than I was in the same plight—even Coleridge; who admires the perfect German Diction, the Songs, Choruses, etc. (which are such parts as cannot be translated into Prose); he also praises Margaret and Mephistopheles; but thinks Faust himself dull, and great part of the Drama flat and tiresome; and the whole Thing not a self-evolving Whole, but an unconnected Series of Scenes: all which are parts that can be judged of from Translation, by Goethe's own Authority. I find a great want of Invention and Imagination ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... for base and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the incredulus odi is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and Margaret are excellent; but Faust himself is dull and meaningless. The scene in Auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the Brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. But there is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Brothers' "No Name Series," Miss Alcott wrote "A Modern Mephistopheles," her least agreeable book, but original, imaginative, and powerful. The moral of the story is that, in our modern life, the devil does not appear with a cloven foot, but as a cultivated man of the world. Miss Alcott's Mephistopheles is even capable of generous impulses. With the ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... rascality of the landlord's 'bhaya' who insisted upon his own 'dasturi' as well. Here a famished cat crouched over a pile of garbage hard by the sweeper's 'gali'; there on the opposite side of the road a Marwadi with the features of Mephistopheles dozed over his account book; and a little further away a naked child was dipping her toes in a pool of sullage water that had dripped from the broken pipe athwart the house wall. Darkness reigned on the upper floors. At intervals a faint glimmer might be discerned behind the sodden ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... line that he had learnt from Wills's "Mephistopheles" came into his mind as he crouched there. "I feel like a cat on the tiles," he whispered to himself. It was far better than he had expected—this adventurous exhilaration. He was sorry for all poor men to whom burglary was unknown. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... the dark girl who sat by herself? Could she call him at will by looking at him? Could it be that—? It made her shiver to think of it.—And who was that strange horseman who passed Mr. Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so like Mephistopheles galloping hard to be in season at the witches' Sabbath-gathering? That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her, they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... this book Kossuth is her hero, her prophet, her demigod; and she sacrifices all other celebrities without compunction at the altar of his greatness. Dembinsky she treats with manifest injustice; Georgey comes out on her pages as a very Mephistopheles. Klapka himself does not escape without animadversion. But without adopting her opinions, either of the man she blames or the subject she discusses, it cannot be denied that she has great cleverness, and a wonderful power of exciting ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... drawing of destiny in the shape of Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away from the true point of attack. The fiend makes preparation his favorite object of mockery, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... let me be there to decide for you, child, or you'll be snapped up by the first adventurer that comes along," declared Nora. "Don't trust him if he has a mustache. 'Daring Dick of the Black Gang' had a little twisted mustache like Mephistopheles ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... beautiful in nature may be keen, but it will continually vanish before humour or mere fun; while having no deep root in life or interests in common with the settled Anglo-Saxon citizen, he cannot fail to appear at times to the latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery" is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... himself the ability to carry through the thing he has undertaken. With a sort of tingling double consciousness he felt at once the enthusiasm of injured virtue at last triumphant, and the mocking scorn of a Mephistopheles who bejuggles dupes too dull to withstand him. He looked around the meeting, and in a swift instant noted who of friends or foes were present; and even tried to calculate in that brief instant what would be the effect upon ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... degenerating into cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable biographies, and it was always the human side of history that appealed to Froude. He once playfully compared himself with the Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor's chair. But in truth he saw always behind historical events the directing providence of God. Newman held that no belief could stand against the destructive force of the human ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the very personation of animal sensual life. He would have been to Faust a more dangerous tempter than Mephistopheles. There was no sneer on HIS lip at the pleasures which animated his voice. To one awaking to a sense of the vanities in knowledge, this reckless ignorant joyousness of temper was a worse corrupter than all the icy mockeries of a learned Fiend. But when Paolo ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... brows, terminating in two little tufts, which give his countenance a strange and, as some might think, an almost sardonic expression. Altogether, it strikes me as being the face of a cynical yet not ill-natured or malicious Mephistopheles. ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... not always born, it is sometimes made, despite what the copy-books assure us to the contrary. The wit and irony of the man and painter come both from Berlin and from his Jewish ancestry. He looks like a benevolent Mephistopheles, and is kindness ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, marking the god's protest, will doubtless hurry the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest. Indeed, that has happened since ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... heaven, look not so fierce on me, Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile; Ugly hell gape not; come not, Lucifer; I'll burn my books; oh! Mephistopheles!" ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea—I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact was that it was of the natural color, and only affected by the lurid character of the dress and by the Satanic penciling of the eyebrows! You have? Well, this face ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Arnold of more recent times, men of intelligence? Were not the parties to the recent tragedy, two of whom Mr. Beecher united in unholy wedlock, passable enough in point of merely intellectual cultivation? Mephistopheles was a person of surprising accomplishments, and the ablest debates in literature are those which Milton puts in the mouths of the grand synod of devils in Pandemonium. Byron was a prodigy of intelligence; but, whether ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... though prompted by the events of 1830, makes no mention of Poland. It is a double tragedy in which the central figure, Henryk, after wrecking his home life by his egotism, assumes the leadership of his class, aristocratic and decadent, against a communistic rising led by Pankracy, a Mephistopheles who is not sure of himself. Henryk goes down in the struggle, but his conqueror falls in the hour of triumph with the words 'Vicisti Galilaee' on his lips. The scenes from the domestic tragedy are strangely moving: the sequel, in which the influence of Faust is obvious, is chiefly noteworthy ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... her return the next year until her death in Boston from overwork on March 6th, 1888, the day of her father's funeral, she published twenty volumes, including two novels: one anonymous, 'A Modern Mephistopheles,' in the 'No Name' series; the other, 'Work,' largely a record of her own experience. She rewrote 'Moods,' and changed the sad ending of the first version to a more cheerful one; followed the fortunes of her 'Little Women' and their children in 'Little Men' and 'Jo's Boys,' and published ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... against a common enemy, an enemy we have hood-winked and waylaid, and whom we shall try to catch unarmed. Then when the hour of triumph shall sound, I will rise up; from Germany, in her intoxication, I will snatch a covenant, which, like that of Faust with Mephistopheles, she has signed with her blood, and by which she also, like Faust, has traded her soul away for ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... appeared like scarlet-fever, and raged violently for a time; for, being anything but a "passive bucket," Di became prophetic with Mahomet, belligerent with Cromwell, and made the French Revolution a veritable Reign of Terror to her family. Goethe and Schiller alternated like fever and ague; Mephistopheles became her hero, Joan of Arc her model, and she turned her black eyes red over Egmont and Wallenstein. A mild attack of Emerson followed, during which she was lost in a fog, and her sisters rejoiced inwardly when she emerged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... those of morality, is not, in our opinion, so disgraceful a fault as its singularly inhuman spirit. We have here Belial, not as when he inspired Ovid and Ariosto, "graceful and humane," but with the iron eye and cruel sneer of Mephistopheles. We find ourselves in a world, in which the ladies are like very profligate, impudent and unfeeling men, and in which the men are too bad for any place but Pandaemonium or Norfolk Island. We are surrounded by foreheads of bronze, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... poets are endowed with the power of creating beings who seem to act and speak with perfect independence, so that the poet is nothing more than the relator of what takes place. When Goethe had conceived Faust and Margarete, Mephistopheles and Wagner, they moved and had their being without any exercise of his will. But in the peculiar power which Petronius exercises, in its application to every scene, to every individual character, in everything, noble or mean, which ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... bring him to her feet she would love him; if not, she would make her revenge tell. He should not wed Vaura Vernon, if a woman's tongue sharp as a two-edged sword could cut their lives apart. She would be content to repeat the little act of barter that the young man did for Marguerite with Mephistopheles, for Lionel's love. She had learned and practised society's creed, and paid its tolls; surely now she was free to have her pets, and love them too; whether it were a poodle dog or a man, whether it were a trip to her ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... loaded silence filled the room As with the imminent spirit of the dead Listening. And long that picture haunted me: Nash, like a lithe young Mephistopheles Leaning between the silver candle-sticks, Across the oak table, with his keen white face, Dark smouldering eyes, and black, dishevelled hair; Chapman, with something of the steady strength That helms our ships, and something of the Greek, The cool ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... ourselves, the code that moulded the important part of the undergraduate world and defied authority, he regarded any defection from it in the light of treason. An instructor, in a fit of impatience, had once referred to him as the Mephistopheles of his class; he had fatal attractions, and a remarkable influence. His favourite pastime was the capricious exercise of his will on weaker characters, such as his cousin, Ham Durrett; if they "swore off," Ralph made it his business to get them drunk ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of malicious pantomime. A spirit of love, and a spirit of rest, as if breathing from St. John the Evangelist, had seemed to mould the harmonies of that earliest stage in my childhood which had just vanished; but now, on the other hand, some wicked Harlequin Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at the roots of life. Yet, in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh beneficence. If, because the great vision of love had ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... exaggeration in their gestures, and mannerism in their bearing. I left my box saying to myself: "I too can do Hamlet, and I will try it!" In some characters Irving is exceptionally fine. I am convinced that it would be difficult to interpret Shylock or Mephistopheles better than he. He is most skilful in putting his productions on the stage; and in addition to his intelligence he does not lack the power to communicate his counsels or his teachings. Withal he is an accomplished ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... think the best chapters in it are those which bring us into contact with Cartwright and other Methodist ministers, the frontiersmen and bushfighters of the Church, who do not bandy subtilties with Mephistopheles, nor consider that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, but go in for a rough-and-tumble fight with Satan and his imps, as with so many red Injuns undeserving of the rights and incapable of the amenities of civilized warfare. We confess a thorough liking for these Leatherstockings of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... a great mistake to figure Mephistopheles as a rather blase brunette," she remarked crisply. "I am absolutely certain that if you could catch the devil without his mask you'd ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... length. One end was monopolised by the door that admitted them, the other by a window from floor to ceiling. And this window was in two great sheets of ruby glass, so that Pocket looked down red-hot iron steps into a crimson garden, and therefrom to his companion dyed from head to foot like Mephistopheles. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don't you see, had been planning to be assistant-manager by and by under the present man, and I could see that the coming of that Kurtz had upset them ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of his stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakes with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and the great actor. See him as Mephistopheles in "Faust." The Lyceum performance was a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figure drifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil Mephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomes a kind of weary spirit, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... waned mantled in a full flood. Shosshi stood breathless, gazing half suspiciously, half credulously at his strictly honorable Mephistopheles. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... satin, with its blue silk counterpane and its embroidered cushion at the foot of the bed; and her boudoir, which looked to the Vatican, was full of vases of malachite and the skins of wild animals, and had a bronze clock on the chimney-piece set in a statue of Mephistopheles. The only other occupant of her house, besides her servants, was a distant kinswoman, called her aunt, and known to familiars as the Countess Betsy; but in the studio below, which was connected with the living rooms ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... MEPHISTOPHELES. Ah! my dear Doctor, here we are again! Micawber-like, I never will desert you. How do you feel? Your house I see myself In perfect order. Ah! how much has past Since those Lyceum days when you and I Climbed up the ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... long and assiduous and patient education. The primary fountains of our Nation's wealth are not in fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools, churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception. History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or Shakespeare ever had to make "his ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... second nature to Uriah Heep. In short, take him for all in all, he was probably the most loathsome character in all European history. He has frequently been called, by Protestant historians, an incarnate devil; but we do not think that Mephistopheles would acknowledge him. He should rather be classed among those creatures described by Dante as "a Dio ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... make up—thank you!" A shudder ran through her, and she began drawing on her gloves. "You taught me a lot, you know. I ought to be quite grateful. Oh, you've grown a little beard! D'you think that improves you? It makes you look rather like Mephistopheles, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the acquirement of learning and to hard work as a scholar, without having his soul-hunger appreciably relieved, is dissatisfied and in his disappointment wishes to be released from this life, which has grown to be a burden to him. At this moment Mephistopheles, the incarnation of the Evil One, appears and persuades him to try life in a new shape. The old and learned Doctor has only known it in theory, Mephisto will now show it to him in practice and in all the splendor of youth and freshness. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... dog's fat applied externally (as when rubbed upon boots) attracts dogs by its smell. Grant saw a young chimpanzee throw itself into convulsions of terror at the sight of a large snake; and even among ourselves a Gretchen can often detect a Mephistopheles. An insect of the genius bombyx will seize another of the genus parnopaea, and kill it wherever it finds it, without making any subsequent use of the body; but we know that the last-named insect lies in wait for the eggs ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... disciple of the same school: he inspires me with the strongest antipathy I ever felt for a human being. Insignificant and disagreeable is his appearance, he looks as if all the bile under heaven had found its way into his complexion, and all the infernal irony of a Mephistopheles into his turned-up nose and insolent curled lip. He is, he says he is, an atheist, a materialist, a sensualist: the pains he takes to deprave and degrade his nature, render him so disgusting, that I could not ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... his lips. The church bells of Easter Sunday recall to his mind the scenes of his innocent childhood, and he puts aside the cup and resolves to commence a new career of life. At this moment, his evil genius, Mephistopheles, appears, and persuades him to abandon philosophy and to enjoy the pleasures of the world. Faust yields to his advice, and after many adventures ends his career in crime and in misery. Many parts of the poem are written in a mystical vein, and intimate rather than express the various reflections ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... exquisite, that all Europe, nay, the Pope would be inflamed to behold them. The passage is omitted, though worthy of the satiric vein of Mephistopheles. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest. His look, as we mentioned, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Eversleigh, when that sallow-faced surgeon is his partner at whist, or hangs about his chair at ecarte," said one of the officers in Reginald Eversleigh's regiment. "It's my opinion that black-eyed Frenchman is Mephistopheles in person. I never saw a countenance that so fully realized my ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Marguerite's prison, Mephistopheles sang, and the orchestra imitated the gallop of horses. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... noticeable appearance, also linoleum for the floor, had finally been gathered together and were treasured for a time as household gods indeed. In those days there was hardly a commandment in the decalogue that Mephistopheles might not have induced Mrs. Phillips to commit by judicious praise of her "room." Her occasional "visitors" were ushered into it with an air of pride that was alone enough to illuminate the dingy, musty little place. Between herself and those of her ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... sure to get a reply by return mail, unless Mephistopheles interferes, which is not unlikely, since Mephistopheles is said to have been much pleased with the manner in which the eminent tragedian has put him before the ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... Levrault. You can't say what you think, if it is true, as an illustrious author says it is, that a man must think his words before he speaks his thoughts," cried a young man, standing near, who played the part of Mephistopheles in ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... efforts to grasp this slippery, double-doing and double-thinking Negative, infinitely elusive, verily the old Serpent. But the supreme attempt is the modern poetic one, made by Goethe in his Faust poem, in which is embodied anew the mighty Negative, who is now none other than the devil, Mephistopheles. Thus the last world-poet reaches across the ages and touches elbows with the first world-poet ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... to have the sensations of a witness to a debate between Mephistopheles and the powers of heaven. Her head swam. But Mrs. Holt, who had unlooked-for flashes of humour, laughed, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tremendous shouting and waving of flags. This was true even where it was plain that the people did not appreciate the significance of it. Pulchinellos brandished their wooden swords, Indian chieftains danced around it screaming their mighty war-whoops, a Mephistopheles turned somersaults, knights mounted on stilts saluted, and children with wax masks shrieked until it was impossible to hear one's ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... is, I know lots of men who would enter upon a life of crime rather than take a chance of going there when they die. I think there is a special place in Hades, where the mannish woman will be made to wear a mother-hubbard and let down her back hair. If there isn't, Mephistopheles don't understand his ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... enduring treaty of peace. This was done, and though Labouchere, Louis's agent, had so little to offer that his propositions were farcical, yet there was at least the show of a diplomatic negotiation. At this juncture the superserviceable Mephistopheles of the Empire, Fouche, intervened. By an agent of his own he approached the cabinet of St. James with an offer of peace on the basis of restoring the Spanish Bourbons and compensating Louis XVIII by a kingdom to be carved from the territories ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... freezing point, though even eternal frost does not exclude life entirely, as is proved by the existence of the glacier flea, showing that even in the icy coverings of the Alps life still is possible. Mephistopheles ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... younger than now; a mere girl, full of girlish fancies—romantic, as called. I thought him handsome; and in a sense so he is. In person, you'll admit, he's all man may, or need, be—a sort of Apollo, or Hyperion. But in mind—ah, Inez, that man is a very Satyr—in heart and soul a Mephistopheles." ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... meditating, as he was, a course which should be destructive to Braxmar, was gentle, courteous, serenely thoughtful. Like a true Mephistopheles he was waiting, surveying Mrs. Carter and Berenice, who were seated in front chairs clad in such exotic draperies as opera-goers affect—Mrs. Carter in pale-lemon silk and diamonds; Berenice in purple and old-rose, with a jeweled comb ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Germany to-morrow morning; I shall be back here in six weeks, and possibly I may call and see you again; I wonder whether you'll be still out of place!" he laughed, as mockingly, as heartlessly as Mephistopheles, and so laughing, vanished. ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... "Orphee," most splendid. An opera of "Faust," a very sad and noble rendering of that sad and noble story. Stage management remarkable for some admirable, and really poetical, effects of light. In the more striking situations, Mephistopheles surrounded by an infernal red atmosphere of his own. Marguerite by a pale blue mournful light. The two never blending. After Marguerite has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird evening draws on, and the bloom fades from ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... established law can seldom keep pace with this inner development, this growth of moral consciousness; it lags behind. A condition of things arises where the living moral consciousness of the people conflicts with the established law, where legal forms are superannuated, but still exist, and Mephistopheles' ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... have found it difficult to realize that only thirty-four years had plowed those deep, rugged lines in his swarthy and colorless but still handsome face; where midnight orgies and habitual excesses had left their unmistakable plague-spot, and Mephistopheles had stamped his signet. Blase, cynical, scoffing, and hopeless, he had stranded his life, and was recklessly striding to his grave, trampling upon the feelings of all with whom he associated, and at war with a world, in which ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... highly descriptive. He was Ariel and the Snake. The latter suited him because of his noiseless gliding movement, bright eyes, and ethereal diet. It was first given to him by Byron during a reading of "Faust". When he came to the line of Mephistopheles, "Wie meine Muhme, die beruhmte Schlange," and translated it, "My aunt, the renowned Snake," Byron cried, "Then you are her nephew." Shelley by no means resented the epithet. Indeed he alludes to it in his letters, and in a poem already ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... hoping will be soon changed. So long, however, as the deadly liquor is sold in almost every store and cabin, the cause of disturbances will remain, and men's active brains, continually fired with poison as they are, will concoct schemes diabolical enough to shame a Mephistopheles. ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... the 21st, 22nd, and 24th of April. On the 26th of July, Penautier was discharged; fuller information was desired concerning Belleguise, and the arrest of Martin was ordered. On the 24th of March, Lachaussee had been broken on the wheel. As to Exili, the beginner of it all, he had disappeared like Mephistopheles after Faust's end, and nothing was heard of him. Towards the end of the year Martin was released for want of sufficient evidence. But the Marquise de Brinvilliers remained at Liege, and although she was shut up in a convent she had by no means abandoned one, at any rate, of the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
