"Mephistopheles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last few years people have been complaining a little of the necessity of getting something new each year. Mrs. Bates, for example, has exhausted the possibilities of her husband's summer bath robe. It served excellently at first as a Roman toga, and the next year it did well enough for Mephistopheles. By cutting away the parts ravaged by moths it passed as a pirate, but she despairs of any further alteration. Then, too, it would always be remembered that a stranger at the last Vernal had in all seriousness reproved old Professor Narbo, the Chemist, for not taking ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... mere matter of fact, it may be almost unnecessary to mention that no such idea had occurred to worthy Mr. Fladgate, who, though he certainly was anxious to secure the book if he could, by any legitimate means, was anything but a publishing Mephistopheles. He had an object, however, in making this last appeal for confidence, as will appear immediately; but, innocent as it was, Mark's imagination conjured up a bland demon tempting him to some act of unspeakable ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... became military, and smiled with a special and peculiar urbanity. Several lesser but still lordly functionaries appeared among the pillars; a page-boy emerged by magic from the region of the chimney-piece like Mephistopheles in Faust's study; and some guests of both sexes strolled chattering across the tessellated pavement as they passed from one wing of the hotel to ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of society when writs were issued for a new election. Encouraged by it, John Wilkes once more stepped upon the stage, and offered himself as a candidate for the suffrages of the people. And, as it has been well said, Mephistopheles himself could not have chosen a better time for mischief. For, at this time, the populace had no idol in whom they could place their confidence, and they hailed his reappearance with delight. By their aid, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's face would have said that artists had failed in their conceptions of Mephistopheles. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... down by the banks of secret rivers. The sad turpitudes, the casuistry of concupiscence, the ironic discolourations and feverish delving into subterranean moral stratifications were as yet afar. He was young, handsome, with a lithe, vigorous body and the head of an aristocratic Mephistopheles, a head all profile, like the heads of Hungary—Hungary itself, which is all profile. Need we add that after the death of his father he soon wasted a fortune? But the reckless bohemian in him was ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... forms of religion which were all she had to bring into the field: so wretched and false were they—feeblest she found them just where she had regarded them as invincible—that in destroying them Faber did even a poor part of the work of a soldier of God: Mephistopheles describes ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the Emperor in the latter days of his reign. Utterly unscrupulous, with everything to gain for himself and his party, and with absolutely nothing to lose but a life which he took good care to save by avoiding danger, he insinuated himself into the confidence of Maximilian, and became the Mephistopheles of the last act in the Mexican drama. Having but recently risen to the confidential position he now occupied near the person of the Emperor, the latter's abdication was obviously against his interests. When the ministers threatened to resign, he is stated to have represented ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... summary of 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 ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... formulated his 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 ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... back in the carriage 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
... 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. Faust agrees, and Mephisto endows him with youth and ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Michael Angelo is that the observer feels his whole frame enlarged." It is creation, it is representing beings and things different from our nature, but true to their own. In this self-consistency is the only nature requisite in works purely imaginative. Lear is true to his nature, and so are Mephistopheles, and Prometheus, and Achilles; but they are not true to human nature; they are beings created by the poets' minds, and true to their laws of being. There is no commoner blunder in men, who are themselves mere critics, never creators, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... close-cropped, with expansive chest to waistcoat, and compressive waist to coat: saturnine as to his pantaloons, calm as to his feminine boots, precious as to his jewellery, smooth and white as to his linen: dark-eyed, high-foreheaded, hawk-nosed - got up, one thinks, like Lucifer or Mephistopheles, or Zamiel, transformed into a highly genteel Parisian - has the green end of a pine-apple sticking ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... appreciation of the 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 Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite, smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for this new Germany of the barracks, the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... bit of a lamp had been sneering drily at me, like some Mephistopheles: and that tiniest sneer had screened off this infinite light of joy issuing forth from the deep love which is in all the world. What, forsooth, had I been looking for in the empty wordiness of the book? There was the very thing itself, filling the ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... in Marguerite's prison, Mephistopheles sang, and the orchestra imitated the gallop ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... between the master and 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 dark ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... anger, minute and varied picturesqueness, and a diabolical subtlety. Whether he paws 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, a melancholy image of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... 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. Nothing happened. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... proposition. Your thought may in consequence be 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' advice: — ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... unable to behold any one. I once heard a young lady in New York profess unbounded admiration for him, because "he looked so charmingly like the devil." For many years the New York Herald always described him as the Reverend Mephistopheles Hurlbut. There was another very beautiful lady who afterwards died a strange and violent death, as also a friend of mine, an editor in New York, both of whom narrated to me at very great length "a grotesque Iliad of the wild ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... him with a hatred that 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 ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... just as well as in most men; or else in the narrower sense, and then it is lacking in most men just as much as in the majority of animals. On the whole, we may still say of man's reason what Goethe's Mephistopheles said:— ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... mercy! 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
... supply endless food for such likings; while their instincts and their transformations, as well as the equally wondrous chemical transformation of salts and gases into living plants, which agricultural chemistry teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day Mephistopheles's magic song, when he draws wine out of the table in ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... appearance, in order to give it a place within the divine order. He sees the night, but he also sees the day succeed it. Man falls into sin, but he cannot rest in it. It is contradictory to his nature, he cannot content himself with it, and he is driven through it. Mephistopheles promised more than he could perform, when he undertook to make Faust declare himself satisfied. There is not within the kingdom of evil what will satisfy the spirit of man, whose last law is goodness, whose nature, however obscured, is ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... II, 5. Mephistopheles' words, when he hands over to Faust the proceeds of a voyage. [War, trade, and piracy are trinity ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... 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
... Turpentine, and Myrrh or Frankincense of temper and imagination, which may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth of Marburg to those of St. Mephistopheles of Weimar. ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... of outraged national rights!!! Thus Richard, Duke of Gloucester, appears with prayer-book and rosary on the terrace of the castle, thus Mephistopheles dons the mask of lawyer and philosopher, thus Iscariot kisses the Saviour.—"My German Fatherland," by PASTOR TOLZIEN, quoted ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's, and shines most unctuously with "thy incomparable oil, Macassar."' Willis was always ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... 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 ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... could any self-respecting woman like such a man? His every glance is an insult. With his polished manners and sardonic smile he reminds one of Mephistopheles." ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... crowded steamboat, and is far off with our guest, among the green valleys and hoary hills of old England. The trapper, beyond the Rocky Mountains, has left his lonely tent, and is unroofing the houses in London with the more than Mephistopheles at my elbow. And, perhaps, in some well-lighted hall, the unbidden tear steals from the father's eye, as the exquisite sketch of the poor schoolmaster and his little scholar brings back the form of that gifted boy, whose ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... 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
... must have your joke, conte; but remember that if you place the countess in the position of Marguerite, you, as the giver of the jewels, naturally play the part of Mephistopheles." ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... "That Mephistopheles on horseback, named Philippe Bridau," said Bixiou, as they mounted the staircase, "has sailed his boat cleverly to get rid of his wife. You know our old friend Lousteau? well, Philippe paid him a thousand francs a month to keep Madame Bridau in the society of Florine, ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... turf it, And after venting Pity's sigh and groan, Then curiosity began with her fit; And lo! the features of the Small Unknown! 'Twas he that of the surf had had this surfeit! And in his fob, the cause of late monopolies, We found a contract signed with Mephistopheles! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... show that there are few things on the face of the earth in which he believes at all. Dim, mystic, childish, with open mouth and staring eyes, the German sees the whole phantasmagoria of the nether world pass before him: keen, biting, sarcastic—egotistic as a beauty, and cold-hearted as Mephistopheles—the Frenchman walks among his figures in a gilded drawing room; probes their spirits, breaks their hearts, ruins their reputation, and seems to have a profound contempt for any reader who is so carried away by his power as to waste a touch of sympathy on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... 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
... everywhere, where there is air and moisture, and a temperature which is not always below 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 may ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... after, he was full of the poem—dwelt with enthusiasm on the airy beauty of its lyrics, the terrible pathos of the scene before the Mater Dolorosa, and the deep skill shown in the various subtle shadings of character between Mephistopheles and poor Margaret. He remarked, however, of the Introduction (which I suspect was new to him), that blood would out—that, consummate artist as he was, Goethe was a German, and that nobody but a German would ever have provoked a comparison with the Book of Job, "the grandest poem that ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... 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 ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... not it. I am afraid of the man himself. He reminds me of that hateful creature—what is he?—in the opera, for which Mr. Aird gave us the tickets, and which Agnes went with us to see—Mephistopheles." ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... marriages. In 1870 she went abroad a second time, and from 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 ten volumes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Mine 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 ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 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: 1710-1720—The South Sea Company] ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... of the personality of Paganini, as you remember, except that he was a smaller man; long, gaunt, yellowish hands and the face of a haggard Mephistopheles. The critics quarrelled about him, as critics only quarrel about real genius, and while one school proclaimed that Tcheriapin had discovered an entirely new technique, a revolutionary system of violin playing, another school was equally positive in declaring that he could not play ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... hallowed by the occupancy of M. de Talleyrand. The window is still pointed out at which the eminent diplomatist used to sit surveying the crowds that thronged the Boulevards, with his usual fine and cynical smile, like a Mephistopheles of the nineteenth century. A little later, and one has a vision of a young man of short stature, elegantly dressed, who every day or two rides up to door or window, springs from his horse, calls for a particular ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... his writings,—though there also, as in every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded,—what sort of spiritual construction he has, what are his temper, his affections, his individual specialties. For all lives freely within him: Philina and Clanchen, Mephistopheles and Mignon, are alike indifferent, or alike dear to him; he is of no sect or caste: he seems not this man or that man, but a man. We reckon this to be the characteristic of a Master in Art of any sort; and true especially of all great Poets. How true is it of Shakespeare ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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 in ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... 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
... won't, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why—why don't you take it!" She was only five years ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... this war if we had given Macedonia to them, although it is not certain, because the frontiers of their ambitions are in Constantinople, Salonica and on the Adriatic. Still Serbia could not barter her soul like Faust with Mephistopheles. Five hundred years ago the Serbs and Greeks defended Macedonia from the Turkish invasion. In 1912 it was Serbia with Greece again who liberated Macedonia from the Turkish yoke. Bulgaria never defended Macedonia from the Turks. Her first fighting for Macedonia was in 1913 ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... appeals to the ear and to the feelings. Yet, I cannot help entertaining some little doubt, when I see Herr Joachim—all alone and solitary— sitting on high in the curule chair of the Academy—with nothing in his hand but a violin; for towards violinists generally I have always felt as Mephistopheles feels towards "the fair," whom he affects "once for all in the plural." The conductor's baton is reported not to have worked well in Herr Joachim's hands; composition, too, appears rather to have been a source of bitterness to him than of ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... throw oneself from a height took possession of me. Almost a physical urging of the body, as if some hidden Mephistopheles not only poured into the soul his hellish advice to end your life, but pushed you to the brink. As never before the evil desire to fall from that terrible height attacked me, and the world became a black dizziness. Struggling, I threw ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... 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
... 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 ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... more thorough acquaintance with Goethe than had Scott, and it seems probable that the younger man influenced the elder in his judgment on Faust and on Goethe's character. In the Introduction to Quentin Durward we find an interesting comment on Goethe's success in creating a really wicked Mephistopheles, who escapes the noble dignity that Milton and Byron gave to their pictures of Satan. Goethe and Scott exchanged letters once in 1827,[339] and it was a personal grief to Sir Walter that the German poet's death prevented a visit Scott proposed to make him in 1832. In Anne ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... as Faust sold his to Mephistopheles. Your Lieutenant became your master; you found it convenient to believe his version of every thing, and to justify him in every thing, and you ended in making all his devilments your own, and adopting the whole infernal spawn and brood, with ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... acute judge of men. He read their motives, their bad ones especially, with the accuracy of a Mephistopheles, and with the same cold contempt for ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the Dante Symphony. I have read somewhere that Liszt used pages to produce an effect which Berlioz accomplished in the apparition of Mephistopheles in Faust with three notes. This comparison is unjust. Berlioz's happy discovery is a work of genius and he alone could have invented it. But the sudden appearance of the Devil is one thing and the depiction of Hell quite ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... 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 favourite poets and writers. Passages in the volumes once so loved, and now ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... priests and peasants, travelling in many lands, exhausting the resources of art and learning, seeing through the sins and shams and sorrows of life, and laughing at everything, like a good-natured, large-hearted Mephistopheles. But he had never learned the true philosophy of joyousness in the sincere love of nature, the deep phases of humanity, and the affluence ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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" ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a 'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank. But it was Mephistopheles who said,— ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... teach womankind their own minds, and a touch of it will bring little Wilder round in a jiffy. Try it, my boy, and good luck to you!"—with which Christian advice Mr. Seguin slapped his pupil on the shoulder, and disappeared, like a modern Mephistopheles, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the world was treated as a sort of extended jest-book, where the poet pointed out the bon-mots [Footnote: French; pronounced bong-mos.] and acted in some degree as corrector of the Press. If he discharged this office sometimes in the sarcastic spirit of a Mephistopheles, this, too, was considered as part of his functions. He was the Ter'roe Fil'ius [Footnote: Terroe Filius, son of the earth; that is, a human being.] of the day; and lenity would have been considered, not as an act of discretion, but as ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... is that I had started out for a mild little sort of celebration, apropos of nothing at all in particular, beginning with dinner at the Mephistopheles Restaurant, with a friend of mine. You know the place, perhaps— just on the edge of the automobile district and the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... preface to Prometheus Unbound that "the character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry, which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure." Goethe's Mephistopheles is less dignified than Milton's Satan, but he is full of energy and intellect, and if Faust eventually escapes from his clutches it is only by a miracle. At any rate, Mephistopheles is not an object of derision; on the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... taste than by 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, hearts like ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... in the dusk of the evening, and looking out over the green pasture to where the nigher hills ceased and the distant seemed to come immediately after, their distance only indicated by color, though the whole Ohio "bottom" was between, she forgot the Mephistopheles who sat not far away, and dreamed of August, the "grand," as she fancifully called him. And he let her sit and dream undisturbed for a long time, until the darkness settled down upon ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... this of Figaro. To them he is little more than a buffoon. To Southern Europe, he is the bold, prompt, shrewd, popular ideal, suiting himself by craft to every superior, regarding all things with a shoulder-shrugging, quizzical philosophy; a democratic Mephistopheles; a lurking devil, equalizing himself, and the people with him, by wit and insolence, with nobility itself. Among the Latin races, as in the East, such Figaros often rise, like Oliver le Daim, to power, and the people ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sister, friend: I am interested in the whole town since she lives here." The girls came nearer. They walked without affectation: you could imagine that the spirit of Modesty herself had taught them that quiet demeanor. Suddenly they looked up and saw me. Am I Mephistopheles, to produce such a dire effect? They looked down, they simpered, they laughed a laugh that was not natural: their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... 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 ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Sunday. When he arrives to a certain point in a certain highway, where the road is smooth and hard, and undulates up and down like a Coney Island chute for many miles, he leans forward and puts his chin close to the back of the chauffeur, who is French, and looks like Mephistopheles. ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... 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 ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... difficult to describe it. He seemed to experience a feeling of satisfaction and triumph at the revelations the woman had made; added to which was something that might be termed shrewd; ironical, and derisive. In fact, his face bore no bad resemblance to that of Mephistopheles, as represented in Retsch's powerful conception and delineation of it in his illustration of Goethe's "Faust," so inimitably translated by ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... 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 one and another of what ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... by no means agreeable to look upon; but the grinning face of the Major, the thin lips wreathed into a malicious smile, the small black eyes glittering with a sinister light, looked like the face of a Mephistopheles. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Mephistopheles, it need hardly be added, was on this occasion true to his reputation for punctuality. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is remarked for being one of the last dramatic pieces in which the devil appears on the stage in his proper person—1591. It is also ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... yours to know if you dine with Lord Lilburne. He told me he had asked you. I have just left him. And, by the sofa of Mephistopheles, there was the prettiest Margaret you ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Part of that Power, not understood, Which always wills the bad And always works the good. (Mephistopheles, in Faust.) ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... way, will it not be better, as co-operating with you more effectually in your kind promise to forget the 'printer's error' in my blotted proof, to send me back that same 'proof,' if you have not inflicted proper and summary justice on it? When Mephistopheles last came to see us in this world outside here, he counselled sundry of us 'never to write a letter,—and never to burn one'—do you know that? But I never mind what I am told! Seriously, I am ashamed.... I shall next ask a ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... done it of your own accord, without asking me, you will see how you get through. Faust is so strange an individual that only a few persons can sympathise with his inner condition. Then the character of Mephistopheles is also very difficult, because of his irony, and also because he is the living result of an extensive acquaintance with the world. But you will see ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 British ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... "And Mephistopheles is another name for—the devil! Oh!" She took the tips of his ears with the tips of her fingers and held his head straight while she stared into his eyes. "Look me straight in the face now. No blinking. Are you the devil, ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... distasteful. Of God and the world he thought he knew as much as his teacher, and the scholastic analysis of the processes of thought seemed to him only the deadening of the faculties which he had received from nature. Of these dreary hours in the lecture-rooms the biting comments of Faust and Mephistopheles on university studies in ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... 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 ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... uniform binding in sets Moods Work Hospital Sketches A Modern Mephistopheles and A Whisper in the ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... side, a little later, after the publication of the Reminiscences, Blackwood denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his History is treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The World remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is extraordinary, still less ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... puerile. Common slang abounds, as in "The Vulgar Little Boy;" he talks of "the devil's cow's tail," and is little afraid of extravagances. His metre often assists him, and we have often comic rhyming as where "Mephistopheles" answers to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... was the Mephistopheles of his Doctor Faustus. No doubt, Marlowe was fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him away from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston of his Edward II. That Shakespeare had the legal right to retain Willie Hughes ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Every luxury to be purchased by wealth was described as being there: all the appearances of household indulgence generally found amongst the most self-indulgent of the rich were crowded into this abode. Here the reader was introduced to the demon of the book, the Mephistopheles of the drama. What story was ever written without a demon? What novel, what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect without existing principles both of good and evil? The demon ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... too, if you like, because it commands a view of Church Road. I shouldn't sleep a wink unless I knew that he had gone in with her. It'll be precisely like Faust and Marguerite going into the house, and you and I are Mephistopheles and Martha. Come quick!" ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... undue instance of the 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 ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... face which gave one an idea of the expression "beaute du Diable," for a more perfect type of Satanic intelligence and malignity than it showed at times I cannot conceive. If I had been a figure painter, I should certainly have painted him as Mephistopheles, as he appeared in the audience room in his close-fitting purple costume with scarlet trimmings, his long coat-tails flying behind him when he moved like the fringe of a flame. He was the most curious contrast to the Pope, with his humorous and kindly manner, that it is possible ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... servant of Rome. In the past few happy days he had dwelt apart from the world in the consciousness of a new heaven and a new earth, revealed by Carmen. This sudden call to duty was like a summons from Mephistopheles to the fulfillment ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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 ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... 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 pet club at London of the cane and cigarette, ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... 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
... save through 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 ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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 ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... once more Byron's 'Deformed Transformed,' and must say that to me his talent appears greater than ever. His devil was suggested by my Mephistopheles; but it is no imitation—it is thoroughly new and original; close, genuine, and spirited. There are no weak passages—not a place where you could put the head of a pin, where you do not find INVENTION AND THOUGHT [italics mine]. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... case a mind as free as any can possibly be from stupidity and prejudice. One might almost say that Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to know, without the trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles, with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this jeweler is a subtle musician; and this fine singer and storyteller, with his amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is making mock of us all the while. He takes a malicious pleasure in ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and Benedict 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 Mrs. Stowe's revolting ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Lemaitre's genius took a new development in creating the part of Mephistopheles. The feature of the part which balked and baffled him was the infernal laugh indicated by Goethe. By every expedient that mimicry could suggest day after day he studied to give forth that terrible laugh, but all his efforts were useless: he could not satisfy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... sensitive conscience kept you tongue-tied. This is probably one of the most self-sacrificing acts which will be performed the present summer. But you will remember that Mephistopheles on a certain ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... elf, Pouting and smiling, cheek upon her arm, Not in the least a portrait of alarm. "Now sweet!" I coaxed, and knelt by her, "be good! Go curl your hair; and please your own Maurine, By putting on that lovely grenadine. Not wolf, nor ogre, neither Caliban, Nor Mephistopheles, you'll meet to-night, But what the ladies call 'a nice young man'! Yet one worth knowing—strong with health and might Of perfect manhood; gifted, noble, wise; Moving among his kind with loving eyes, And ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humor, 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, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... others, more and more. Reader, keep them well in mind: I had rather not speak of them again. They are essential to our Story; but they are afflictively vain, contrary to the Laws of Fact; and can, now or henceforth, in nowise be. My friend, it was not Beelzebub, nor Mephistopheles, nor Autolyeus-Apollo that built this world and us; it was Another. And you will get your crown well rapped, M. le Marechal, for so forgetting that fact! France is an extremely pretty creature; but this of making France the supreme Governor and God's-Vicegerent of Nations, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and Dicky were to follow, and Robin had preceded us by two days—was met at the station by an informal but influential little deputation, consisting of Mr Cash, my agent, a single-minded creature who would cheerfully have done his best to get Mephistopheles returned as member if he had been officially appointed to further that gentleman's interests; old Colonel Vincey, who would as cheerfully have voted for the same candidate provided he wore Conservative colours; ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... waiting, and the whole business of the play suspended, for the Justice to make speeches. But the last scene was capital,—prodigious,—full of that dark, dismal, despairing energy you would look for in a dethroned spirit, baffled, like Mephistopheles, at the very moment his arm is outstretched, and his long, lean fingers are clutching at the shoulder of his victim. Being about to cross blades with his adversary, in a paroxysm of rage he plucks at the hilt of his sword, and stops suddenly, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... been since eight o'clock. Eleven was daintily striking now. Its diminutive sonority might have belonged to some church-bell far distant across the Cambridge silence; but it was on a shelf in the room,—a timepiece of Gallic design, representing Mephistopheles, who caressed the world in his lap. And as the little strokes boomed, eight—nine—ten—eleven, the voice of ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... 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 neighbours who had "rooms" ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... 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 Brocken on Walpurgis night. That times have changed ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... left behind with Argemone. Hence loose reins and a 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 of fur, a panting, steaming ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... truth that yet has been confest 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; ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... speech he could think of. It was not a good speech. It was too sinister. He felt that even as he said it. It was the sort of thing Mephistopheles would have said to Faust by way of opening conversation. And he was not sure, either, whether he ought not to have ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... Maintenon's, sat in Colbert's place; gone were Turenne and Conde and Luxembourg; the armies of the descendant of St. Louis were led by the Duke of Vendome, a foul lecher, whose inhuman vices went far to justify the gibe of Mephistopheles that men use their reason "um thierischer als jedes ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... openly and candidly rollick in them from the 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 the world's sinfulness ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... creative; but Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies, is destructive. A negative attitude of mind is not favorable for the production of works of art. The best periods of art have also been periods of spiritual or philosophical convictions. The more a man doubts, the more he disintegrates ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... followed, moving her arms without rhythm or measure. A smile of satisfaction came to the lips of the horrible woman—the smile of a female Mephistopheles who has found an apt pupil: hate, scorn, mockery, and cruelty were in it; a burst of demoniacal laughter could ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... conspirator," said I affectionately, "and have all the lower traits of the Yankee character. But I will use you to carry me to Kehl, as Faust used Mephistopheles. By the by, your carriage is a comfortable one and saves my time. I have two hours before I need return to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Genius to Hell as to Earth! The Fiend comes to Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge; Heaven and Hell stake their cause in the Mortal's temptation. And what does the Fiend to astonish the Mortal? Turn wine into fire, turn love into crime. We need no Mephistopheles to ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bird in its pale-blue 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 by a circular staircase, and hung round with masks, busts, and weapons, there ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... B. The last part (Mephistopheles and final chorus) of the "Faust" Symphony in score—and the complete arrangement of this ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... books and flowers! It was, we said, a good world, and I, simpleton,—pretty and dainty as Margaret was,—deemed it would go on forever. But, alas! one day came a Faust into our garden,—a good Faust, with no friend Mephistopheles,—and took Margaret from me. It is but a month since they were married, and the rice still lingers in the crevices of the pathway down to the quaint old iron-work gate. Yes! they have gone off to spend their honeymoon, and Margaret has written to me twice to say how happy ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... on ass-back; but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and commonplace by ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... relieved, for the voice was that of his revered chief, Mr. Broby, who, he now recollected, was to figure at the masquerade as Mephistopheles. Behind him peeped forth the faces of his two daughters, one as Morning and the ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... reversing the positions of his head and 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
... 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 ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... MEPHISTOPHELES.—I will bind myself to your service here, and never sleep nor slumber at your call. When we meet on the other side, you shall do as much ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... Berenice, 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 ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... thing as he 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... style of his own. Individuality is 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 personified ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... brush a painter could have so altered the expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead, mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent will. The ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of Bernard Shaw Fills me with mingled Mirth and Awe. Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes, The Devil's wit, the Don's Romance Joined to the Cynic's arrogance. Framed on Pythagorean plan, A Vegetable Souperman. Here you may see him crown with bay The Greatest Playwright of his day;[1] Observe the look of Self ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford
... are so 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
... promised story was a German of that particular type in which the sombre irony of Goethe's Mephistopheles is blended with a homely cheerfulness found in the romances of August Lafontaine of pacific memory; but the predominating element in the compound of artlessness and guile, of shopkeeper's shrewdness, and the studied carelessness of a member ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... 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, I think." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... I am always 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
... with this man. Like Mephistopheles in the Raths-Keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an instance in point. Any one familiar with Merimee's stories will smile at the naivete with which Stevenson has taken the leading idea of Lokis, and surrounded it with the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we have "fables," ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Deduced from Cornwall's guary miracles,— From immemorial custom there They raise a turfy theatre! When from a passage underground, By frequent crowds encompassed round, Out leaps some little Mephistopheles, Who e'en of all the mob the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller |
