Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Faust   Listen
proper noun
Faust, Faustus  n.  Doctor Johann Faust, a person born at Kundling (Knittlingen), Würtemberg, or at Roda, near Weimar, and said to have died in 1538. He was a man of licentious character, a magician, astrologer, alchemist, and soothsayer, who boasted of performing the miracles of Christ. German legend has it that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. It was believed that he was carried off at last by the devil, who had lived with him in the form of a black dog. Note: The legends of Faust were gathered from the then recent traditions concerning him in a book which appeared at the book-fair at Frankfurt-on-the-Main in 1587. It was called "The History of Dr. Faustus, the Notorious Magician and Master of the Black Art, etc." Soon after its appearance it became known in England. "A metrical version of it into English was licensed by Aylmer, Bishop of London, before the end of the year. In 1588 there was a rimed version of it into German, also a translation into low German, and a new edition of the original with some slight changes. In 1689 there appeared a version of the first German Faust book into, French, by Victor Palma Cayet. The English prose version was made from the second edition of the original, that of 1588, and is undated, but probably was made at once. There was a revised edition of it in 1592. In 1592 there was a Dutch translation from the second German edition. This gives the time of the carrying off of Faustus by the devil as the night between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of October, 1538. The English version also gives 1538 as the year, and it is a date, as we have seen, consistent with trustworthy references to his actual life. Marlowe's play ('The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus') was probably written in 1588, soon after the original story had found its way to England. He treated the legend as a poet, bringing out with all his power its central thought man in the pride of knowledge turning from his God." This play was brought to Germany about the beginning of the 17th century, and, after passing through various developments on the stage, finally became a puppet-play, which is still in existence. Lessing wrote parts of two versions of the story. Müller, the painter, published two fragments of his dramatized life of Faust in 1778. Goethe's tragedy (which see) was not published till 1808. Klinger published a romance "Faust's Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt" (1791: Borrow translated it in 1826). Klingemann published a tragedy on the subject (1815), Heine a ballet "Der Doctor Faust, ein Tanzpoem" (1851), and Lenau an epic "Faust" (1836). W. G. Wills adapted a play from Goethe's "Faust," which Henry Irving produced in 1885. Calderon's play "El Magico Prodigioso" strongly resembles Goethe's and Marlowe's plays, though founded on the legend of St. Cyprian.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Faust" Quotes from Famous Books



... rubbing my hands, "you are very kind, and so is our mutual friend; I shall be happy to make myself useful in German; and if you think a good translation from Goethe—his 'Sorrows' for example, or more particularly his 'Faust'—" ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... was given its premiere at Laura Keene's Theatre, New York, on February 28, 1857, for the benefit of the Shirt Sewers' Union; and was the second offering of a double bill beginning with "Faust and Marguerite." Though the critiques of the time recognized in it a "nice little play," they balked at what was considered to be a foolish nomenclature, "Comedietta." What was liked about it, particularly, was the absence of patriotic fustian, for the national drama of the time ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce

... 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

... to Erlangen, after the completion of his "cure," Sand read Faust far the first time. At first he was amazed at that work, which seemed to him an orgy of genius; then, when he had entirely finished it, he reconsidered his ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... distractions of the world and of life, the author always heard a voice ringing in his ears and mockingly revealing the secrets of things at the very moment he was watching a woman as she danced, smiled, or talked. Just as Mephistopheles pointed out to Faust in that terrific assemblage at the Brocken, faces full of frightful augury, so the author was conscious in the midst of the ball of a demon who would strike him on the shoulder with a familiar air and say to him: "Do you notice that enchanting smile? It is a grin of hatred." And then the demon ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... definite justification are wanting. Goethe failed in this in his Faust, resourceful and far-seeing though he was—he failed because a certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say, chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L. Stevenson. Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... by that time. Above him was a clear, steel-blue sky; in front, across the hollow, rose Campden Hill, a dim, dark mass, twinkling with lights. By the square at his side a German band was playing the garden music from 'Faust,' with no more regard for expression and tunefulness than a German band is ever capable of; but distance softened the harshness and imperfection of their rendering, and Siebel's air seemed to Vincent the expression of his own passionate, ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... and a motive that suggested the lithe panther stealing on its prey. The door was ajar, and a hasty glance revealed that the object of her designs was alone. Her stealthy manner changed instantly, and she sauntered into the room with quiet indifference, humming an air from Faust. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... the work of Arthur Davison Ficke runs a note of bigness that compels attention even when one feels that he is still groping both for form and thought. In "Mr. Faust" this note has assumed commanding proportions, while at the same time the uncertainty manifest in some of the earlier work has almost wholly disappeared. Intellectually as well as artistically, this play shows a surprising maturity. It impresses me, for one, as the expression of a well-rounded ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... present instances of the summing up of an entire world of complex associations under some single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of frescoes which commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or like the play of Hamlet or Faust. It was not in an image, or series of images, yet still in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his new impressions set forth, regarding what he had already ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... reserve which I like; but its chief glory is the recognition I find in it of the redeeming potency of woman's self-sacrificing love. This thought pervades all German literature and is mystically expressed in Goethe's "Faust": ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... there and then, being terrified by the horrible aspect of the enemy, they commenced a new life. This thought comes out strongly in Y Bardd Cwsg. The poet introduces one of the fallen angels as appearing to act the part given to the Devil, in the play of Faust, when it was being performed at Shrewsbury, and this appearance drove the frequenters of the theatre from their pleasures to ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... early period there is a certain glorification of chicanery: the fiend fulfils his side of the contract, but God Himself breaks the other side. This becomes a regular feature in all tales that relate dealings with the Evil One: all Devil's Bridges, Devil's Dykes, and the Faust legends show that Satan may be trusted to keep his word, while the saints invariably kept the letter and broke the spirit. To so primitive a tale as that of "The Countess Cathleen" the pettifogging ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... she said hesitatingly. "Clara says it will be very amusing. And you must remember how much I enjoyed 'Faust' and 'Hamlet.'" ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... 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 ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... antiquity, although they originated in classic Italy. It is the grotesque, lastly, which, colouring the same drama with the fancies of the North and of the South in turn, exhibits Sganarelle capering about Don Juan and Mephistopheles crawling about Faust. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... of inventing printing lies between two claimants, Laurens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem (the original of this statue) and Gutenburg of Mayence. The Dutch like to think that Coster was the man, and that his secret was sold to Gutenburg by his servant Faust. Be that as it may—and the weight of evidence is in favour of Gutenburg—it is interesting as one stands by the statue of Coster under the shadow of Haarlem's great church to think that this was perhaps ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... days I knew my "Faust" pretty well, and, after reading this word of might, I was minded to chant the well-known stanzas ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... The "Faust" of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge, calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... was aimed to please The crow, and it succeeded: He thought no bird in all the trees Could sing as well as he did. In flattery completely doused, He gave the "Jewel Song" from "Faust." ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... pretty full translation of Schiller's AESTHETIC LETTERS, which we read together, as well as the second part of FAUST, in Gladstone Terrace, he helping me with the German. There is no keepsake I should more value than the MS. of that translation. They were the best days I ever had with him, little dreaming all would so soon be over. It needs a blow like this to convict a man ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the proper thing to play, and when the crowd demands the newest rag-time. She will feel an atmospheric change as unswervingly as any barometer, and switch in a moment from "Good-bye Girls, Good-bye" to the love duet from Faust. She can play Chopin just as well as she can play Sousa, and she will tactfully strike up "It's Always Fair Weather" when she sees a crowd of young fellows sit down at a table; "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" to welcome a lad ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... the face of a vile March! In that case their published works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of their Saemmtliche Werke than they do. And the second part of "Faust" would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom having wings to match ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... immovable way Mills began charging his pipe. I felt extremely embarrassed all at once, but became positively annoyed when I saw our Prax enter the cafe in a sort of mediaeval costume very much like what Faust wears in the third act. I have no doubt it was meant for a purely operatic Faust. A light mantle floated from his shoulders. He strode theatrically up to our table and addressing me as "Young Ulysses" proposed I should go outside on the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... and that it must have taken the copyist a lifetime to write it. "Why!" exclaimed the archbishop in surprise, "I bought one exactly like it a few days ago." It was soon learned that other rich people in Paris had bought similar copies. The king traced the book to John Faust, of Strasburg, who had furnished Gutenberg money to experiment with. The people said that Faust must have sold himself to the devil, and he only escaped burning at the stake ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... should love to see the Black Forest!' cried Mary, who knew the first part of Faust by heart, albeit she had never been given permission to read it, 'the gnomes and the witches—der Freischuetz—all that is lovely. Of course, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of God; if, in short, he has any true dramatic power: then he may impart to that apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it also; though its farce-tragedy has been too often extensively enacted in practice—unconsciously to the players. As for the old 'pastoral' ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... horrible. It was a purely commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element of risk to one's self, or of offense against a social or disciplinary code. I came away feeling that I had touched bottom in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... graceful; ivory-toned languorous dames, garbed in Second Empire style, languidly stroll in charming parks escorted by fluttering Cupids or stately cavaliers. The "decorative impulse" is here at its topmost. In his second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust, the Don Quixote—recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire entering on the scene, a ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... this pursuit—vile as it is—is warm, which to me is almost an essential of existence. I beg you to understand that I make no pretension to a thorough knowledge of Fetish ideas; I am only on the threshold. "Ich weiss nicht all doch viel ist mir bekannt," as Faust said—and, like him after he had said it, I have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... before me now, with the pictures that adorned it, all of them masterpieces—L'Improvisateur, by Leopold Robert; La Feeme du Brigand, by Schnetz, Faust and Marguerite, by Ary Scheffer; Venice, by ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... series which should include every great imaginative work of the Western world! Thus in 1855 we find him noting the following projects, to be carried out in ten years' time:—illustrations of AEschylus, Lucan, Ovid, Shakespeare, Goethe (Faust), Lamartine (Meditations), Racine, Corneille, Schiller, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Plutarch's Lives—these names among others. The jottings in question were written for a friend who had undertaken to write the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... create imaginary characters, which in their own way revealed my sorrows, my weaknesses, my follies and my virtues, forming new personalities with independent life: as my dear friend Goethe created Werther, Faust, Egmont and Tasso. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... a state of despair, receiving no reply from the prophets, none from the Urim and Thumim, deeply fallen as he was, went in disguise to the Witch of Endor. Goethe's Faust, in imitation thereof, receiving no answer to his questions addressed to heaven and eternity, no answer through his knowledge of nature's laws and nature's forces, no answer from the philosophy of his century and the theology ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... childhood. She chose the Altenburg chateau for her home. A year later, Liszt, who had found a neighbouring hotel too remote, took up his home in one of the wings of the chateau. Here he spent the most profitable years of his artistic life. His twelve Symphonic Poems, his Faust and Dante Symphonies, his Hungarian Rhapsodies, and many other important works, including also literary compositions, he achieved here. The irritation he had felt at the superficial meddling, and domineering criticism of his would-be Muse, the Comtesse d'Agoult, was changed to such a communion as ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes

... 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 contrary, the laugh is generally on his own side. Still, Goethe is playing with the Devil all the time. He does not believe in the actual ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... Although Goethe has been reproached for his lack of sympathy with the liberalizing movement of his day (as if his novels were quieting social influences), it is felt by this generation that the author of "Faust" needs no apology that he did not spend his energies in the effervescing politics of the German states. I mean, that while we may like or dislike the man for his sympathy or want of sympathy, we concede to the author the right of his attitude; if Goethe had ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... aufs neue die blutige Klinge Und begehrt, dem Gefall'nen die tdliche Wunde zu spenden. Hagen, der Recke, jedoch, des eignen Schmerzes vergessend, Beugt schnell nieder das Haupt und hlt es dem Hiebe entgegen, 1370 Und es vermag der Held die geschwungene Faust nicht zu hemmen. Aber der Helm, geschmiedet mit Fleiss und trefflich bereitet, Trotzt dem Hieb, und es sprhen alsbald in die Hhe die Funken. ber die Hrte betroffen, zerspringt, o Jammer! die Klinge, Und in der Luft und im ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... quite inconceivable, like 'Faust' and 'The Scarlet Letter,' ... I thought that ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... playing on him with cumulative effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the whole field of western bad men. The Saturday Review, for October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled "Billy the Kid: Faust in America—The Making of a Legend." The growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period of seventy-one years (1881-1952) by J. C. Dykes in Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... 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

... not, of course, help noticing, to his alarm, the effect upon me of this kind of conversation, which I was far too young to appreciate. Although it annoyed me one day, when I wanted to begin reading Goethe's Faust, to hear him say quietly that I was too young to understand it, yet, according to my thinking, his other conversations about our own great poets, and even about Shakespeare and Dante, had made me so familiar with these sublime ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... relationships. Coleridge declares that the new can only assume living form by growing organically out of the old institutions. Keats gives a sad and yet a wholesome answer to them both, as, young and passionate, he goes down with Faust "to the Mothers"— ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in "Faust" when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the hydrangea bushes. They ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller

... whole generation. To the living influence of Nietzsche there is a host of witnesses. Gerhart Hauptmann, near the beginning of the war, averred that the cultured German soldier carried "Zarathustra," along with "Faust" and the Bible, in his knapsack. Nor was this an idle guess. Professor Deissmann, of Berlin, tells us that he enquired into the matter, and learned from book-sellers that the books most in demand among soldiers were the ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's "Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons. His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this sense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... Hilda, at eighteen years of age, was like the majority of young girls as old as she, would be to imagine that human character is not influenced by its surroundings. She was neither a village Gretchen, such as Faust loved and ruined, nor was she the omniscient damsel of modern society. During the greater part of her existence she had lived without any companions but her mother and the faithful Berbel. But she had grown up in a wild forest country, in a huge dismantled ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... "La premiere fois que je la vis, ce fut a l'eglise",—says Diderot's St. Albin, in recounting the beginning of his infatuation for Sophie. So with Faust and Margaret, and with Schiller's beautiful Greek lady in ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... Tiffany apartments. She and Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Henry M. Sanders and Mrs. George Putnam, had a delightful luncheon with Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. She was invited by Mr. and Mrs. Edward Lauterbach to hear the opera of Faust, which was followed by a supper at the Waldorf. With a relative she attended the "Authors' Uncut Leaves Club," at Sherry's. One Sunday she went to hear Robert Collyer and the diary says: "His grand face, his rich voice, his white hair, were all as attractive as ever; he was a beautiful ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... light upon history. They illuminate the dark passages, clear away the obscurities, and bridge over the gaps. Hugo, in 'Les Miserables,' says men solidified their ideas in architecture before the printed page came from the brain of Faust. He might have added, they wrote their histories upon these bits of gold, silver, iron, brass, and bronze. Vaillant wrote the chronicles of the kings of Syria from a jar of medals, as Cuvier would build up the mastodon and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... does know something about music, but who actually has no prejudices.) "Her voice is such a one as MARGARET must have had when she sang by her spinning-wheel, before fate threw her in the way of FAUST. And these professional musicians will tear her reputation to pieces among themselves! Why should musical people be, of all others, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various

... made with extreme celerity, and from those shelves nearest the piano, it was in the nature of things that it was not invariably a happy one. For some time she had but moderate luck, and sampled queer foods. To these must be reckoned a translation of FAUST, which she read through, to the end of the First Part at least, with a kind of dreary wonder why such a dull thing should be called great. For her next repast, she sought hard and it was in the course of this rummage that she had the strangest find of all. ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... accomplished man of letters. Successive volumes of poetic versions, chiefly from the German, had, by their various merit, gained for him a high rank among our translators, when four years ago, in 1856, by a translation of "Faust," he set himself at the head of living authors in this department of literature. It is little to say of his work, that it is the best of the numerous English renderings of Goethe's tragedy. It is not extravagant to assert that a better translation is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... it is—one never knows—one never says, This is the moment! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... great imaginative work of the Western world! Thus in 1855 we find him noting the following projects, to be carried out in ten years' time:—illustrations of schylus, Lucan, Ovid, Shakespeare, Goethe (Faust), Lamartine (Mditations), Racine, Corneille, Schiller, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Plutarch's Lives—these names among others. The jottings in question were written for a friend who had undertaken to ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... again as a man with his fellow men. He is as distinct a being from the necromancers and astrologers celebrated in Shakspeare's age, as can well be imagined:[46] and all the wizards of poetry and fiction, even Faust and St. Leon, sink into common-places before the princely, the philosophic, the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... you that, last autumn, I furnished Lewis with 'bread and salt' for some days at Diodati, in reward for which (besides his conversation) he translated 'Goethe's Faust' to me by word of mouth, and I set him by the ears with Madame de Stael about the slave trade. I am indebted for many and kind courtesies to our Lady of Copet, and I now love her as much as I always did her works, of which I was and am a great admirer. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... rapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the little thrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the old duets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page—say the dedication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries—one fetches the book and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it out loud.... It is when these things happen that one is really getting the good of books; and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... For a class of beginners, she "thought it good success," she says, "when at the end of three months, they could read twenty pages of German at a lesson, and very well." An advanced class in German read Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, and the first part of Faust, "three weeks of thorough study," she calls it, "as valuable ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... time when a human soul is either wise or happy is in that one single moment when the hour of my own shining or of the moon's beaming seems to that single soul to be past and present and future, to be at once the creation and the end of all things. Faust knew ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... sentiments of grief, coming near the words of despair of Faust. There is a tone in them of what the ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... friend, but you lose sight of the fact that substitutions are always unsatisfactory, if not positively dangerous. Besides, they are strong evidences of weakness. We are nothing if not strong and resourceful. Suppose I substituted 'Faust,' for instance, and announced it with Melba as Marguerite, and suppose again that the famous Astralasian prima donna caught an attack of the American grip that same afternoon, it would hardly do to substitute Marie Cahill or May Irwin to take her place, that is, provided we could ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville

... was made for man, 'twas made for me. Good Angel. Faustus, repent; yet heaven will pity thee. Bad Angel. Thou art a spirit, God cannot pity thee. Faust. Be I a devil, yet God may pity me. Bad Angel. Too late. Good Angel. Never too late if Faustus will repent. Bad Angel. If thou repent, devils will tear thee ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... Goethe, in proving that the Evil Spirit of ancient and Hebrew-Christian times was a mere phantom of an ill-regulated fantasy, taught us to look for the real origin of evil. What was a metaphysical incomprehensibility became an intelligible reality. The Demon can be seen in "Faust" as in a mirror, and in glancing into it we behold our Darwinian progenitor, the animal, face to face. Before the times of Goethe, with very few exceptions, the Evil Spirit was an entity with whom any one might become familiar—in ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... 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 read so seldom, still bear the mark ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... she comforted herself with the thought, that, as he had forgiven her ignorance, she herself might surely forget it. Happy Lizzie, I envy you this easy path to knowledge! The volume she most frequently consulted was an old German "Faust," over which she used to fumble with a battered lexicon. The secret of this preference was in certain marginal notes in pencil, signed "J.". I hope they were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... be a cad again. I'm going up to my bedroom, you may come, 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 ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... waltzed like an angel, and so far his dictionary did not contain the word "fear;" but he knew nothing of poetry or art, and only liked some kinds of music, amongst which, it is to be feared, "Soldiers of the Queen," and the now much-abused chorus from "Faust," ranked high in his estimation. He was just simply a healthy young Englishman, clean-limbed and clean-minded, with a tremendous appetite for pleasure, a magnificent frame, and a heart as light and buoyant as a cork; therefore, though an artist or a poet would have been thrilled ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... tiny clicking rustle along the stone terrace in the twilight. Except for that it was very quiet out there, and he could smell the heliotrope watered not long since. A bat went by. A bird uttered its last 'cheep.' And right above the oak tree the first star shone. Faust in the opera had bartered his soul for some fresh years of youth. Morbid notion! No such bargain was possible, that was real tragedy! No making oneself new again for love or life or anything. Nothing left to do but enjoy beauty from afar off while you could, and leave ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... Holy Apostles in Italy; but in Germany, and still farther north, in Sweden and Norway, it is Walpurgisnacht,—when goblins, witches, hags, and devils hold high holiday, mounting on their brooms for the Brocken. And it was on this night that Mephistopheles carried Faust on his wondrous ride, and showed him the spectre of Margaret with the red line round her throat. Miss Bremer, in her "Life in Dalecarlia," gives the following account of the origin of this custom:—"It is so old," she says, "that there is no perfect certainty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... most astonishing effects of sounds, however, did not find entire approbation with the public, and did not succeed in popularizing themselves. But that fact can be recorded in his favor that every programme containing Liszt's "Dante," or Faust Symphony, or "Mazeppa," receives more than ordinary attention from the public. The same is the case with his solo songs with piano accompaniment, in which, however, ingenious details often tend to drown ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... certain secondhand bookseller, nearly opposite Mistress Murkison's. The books they bought were carried to Donal's room, there to be considered by Gibbie Donal's, and by Donal Gibbie's. Among the rest was a reprint of Marlow's Faust, the daring in the one grand passage of which both awed and delighted them; there were also some of the Ettrick Shepherd's eerie stories, alone in their kind; and above all there was a miniature copy of Shelley, whose ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... Lelia, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who one night sleeps on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays the splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried and hapless lover, Stenio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own accompaniment on the harp, and lingers ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... from my friend H. H. Benedict, had been my pleasant companion on my previous voyage, and again on this it proved one of our greatest sources of pleasure. There were at least two hundred pieces of music in my collection, but the strains of "Faust" rolled out over the Arctic Ocean more often than any other. Marches and songs were also popular, with the "Blue Danube" waltz; and sometimes, when the spirits of my party were at rather a low ebb, we had ragtime pieces, which they ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... violin and orchestra, nine symphonies, four oratories, of which "The Last Judgment" is perhaps the best, ten operas, many concert overtures, etc.—in all more than 200 works, many of them of large dimensions. His best operas are "Jessonda" (1823), "Faust" (1818), "The Alchemist" (1832) and "The Crusaders" (1845). His orchestral works are richly instrumented, and the coloring is sweet and mellow, yet at ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... Hayward's Prose Translation; Eighth Edition. Hayward quotes from Goethe himself, that, though of course much of a Poem must evaporate in a Prose Translation, yet the Essence must remain. Well; I distinguish as little of that Essential Poetry in the Faust now as when I first read it—longer ago than 'Le Bon Pasteur,' and in other subsequent Attempts. I was tempted to think this was some Defect—great Defect—in myself: but a Note at the end of the Volume informs me that a much greater Wit than I was in the same plight—even ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald

... Many of the gentiles received revelations of Christ, as is clear from their predictions. Thus we read (Job 19:25): "I know that my Redeemer liveth." The Sibyl too foretold certain things about Christ, as Augustine states (Contra Faust. xiii, 15). Moreover, we read in the history of the Romans, that at the time of Constantine Augustus and his mother Irene a tomb was discovered, wherein lay a man on whose breast was a golden plate with the inscription: ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... and a number of chamber works of different kinds, of which the quintet for piano and strings is perhaps the most successful; about 100 songs, one opera, several cantatas, a series of music pieces for "Faust," to be played in ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... became even more strenuous and more racking than it had been in Leipsic. He threw himself into the labor of composing the epilogue of Goethe's "Faust" with such ardor that he fell into an intensely nervous state where work was impossible. However, with special medical treatment he so far recovered that he was able to resume the work, but still was not himself. We can divine from brief remarks he ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... Florence Nightingale, Harriet Hosmer, Rosa Bonheur, Mrs. Siddons, represent as much love for the causes they lived or live for as did Vittoria Colonna for her husband, Hester and Vanessa for Swift, Heloise for Abelard, Marguerite for Faust, Ophelia for Hamlet, Desdemona for Othello, or Juliet for Romeo. These last, I repeat, were bound in the cause of love not less than the former; and they all owed their endeavors—their success, if they gained it—to the feelings ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... with marriage, anyhow? I find myself pondering this question so often, when reading high-class literature. I put it to myself again the other evening, during a performance of Faust. Why could not Faust have married the girl? I would not have married her myself for any consideration whatsoever; but that is not the argument. Faust, apparently, could not see anything amiss with her. Both of them were mad about each other. Yet the idea of a quiet, unostentatious ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... mention,—the red-legged, gleaming-eyed, loud-voiced gentleman who pulls the hidden wires which set all the other puppets in motion,—Mr. Mephistopheles himself. Marguerite, studied, refined, unimpassioned in the pretty Yankee girl,—simple, warm, outpouring in the sympathetic German woman,—and Faust, gallant, ardent, winning in the bright-eyed Italian,—thoughtful, tender, fervent in the intelligent German,—are background figures in the picture your memory paints; while the ubiquitous, sneering, specious, cunning, tempting, leering, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... that referred to in Chapter IV. See Appendix II.). Scene 1st, St. Firmin arriving; scene 2nd, St. Firmin preaching; scene 3rd, St. Firmin baptizing; and scene 4th, St. Firmin beheaded, by an executioner with very red legs, and an attendant dog of the character of the dog in 'Faust,' of whom we may have more ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... exertion" Darwin has a point of contact with the practical idealism of former times—with the ideas of Lessing and Goethe, of Condorcet and Fichte. The continual striving which was the condition of salvation to Faust's soul, is also the condition of salvation to mankind. There is a holy fire which we ought to keep burning, if adaptation is really to be improvement. If, as I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Religion, the innermost core of all religion is faith in the persistence of value in the ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... Rankin, quite wrong," said Quinny, who would have stated the other side quite as imperiously. "What you cite is a variation of quite another theme, the Faust theme—old age longing for youth, the man who has loved longing for the love of his youth, which is youth itself. The triangle is the theme of jealousy, the most destructive and, therefore, the ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... with enthusiasm and ardor. The "enthusiasm of humanity" filled her whole soul, was a luminous hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind. With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the substitute for all faith and the cure for all doubt. Faust finds for his life a purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the practical improvement of humanity. This was George Eliot's own conclusion, that it is enough for us to see the world ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... When each had numbered more than four-score years. And Theophrastus, at three-score and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men; Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. These are indeed exceptions; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow Into the Arctic regions of our lives, Where little else than life itself survives. For age is opportunity ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... "Faust" of Gaelic poetry, incommunicable except to the native reader, and, like that celebrated composition, an untranslatable tissue of tenderness, sublimity, and mocking ribaldry. The heroine is understood to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... undertakings on a large scale, and more especially of such as partake of an imitative character. When a juvenile and facile writer's taste is still unsettled, and his own style is as yet unformed, he eagerly tries his hand at the reproduction of the work of others; translates the "Iliad" or "Faust," or suits himself with unsuspecting promptitude to the production of masques, or pastorals, or life dramas—or whatever may be the prevailing fashion in poetry—after the manner of the favourite literary models of the day. A priori, therefore, everything ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... alone—he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began "Faust"; he was where Conrad was when he ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... original, an English translation, and an Italian one; keep them all in your archives, for the opinions of such a man as Goethe, whether favorable or not, are always interesting; and this more so, as being favorable. His 'Faust' I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Geneva, translated most of it to me viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it: but it was the 'Steinbach,' and the 'Yungfrau,' and something else, much more than 'Faustus,' ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... and Crewe noticed with curiosity that he chose the "Soldiers' Chorus" from "Faust" for the dirge ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace

... He is represented as leaning on the trunk of a tree, holding in his right hand a roll of parchment, and in his left a wreath. The pedestal, which is also of bronze, contains bas reliefs, representing scenes from Faust, Wilhelm Meister and Egmont. In the evening Goethe's house, in a street near, was illuminated by arches of lamps between the windows, and hung with wreaths of flowers. Four pillars of colored lamps lighted the statue. At nine o'clock the choir of singers came again in a procession, with ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... was twelve years before, when she saw him for the first time, under the chandeliers of the Moronval salon. Many of the same persons were there also: Labassandre in bottle-green velvet, with the high boots of Faust; and Dr. Hirsch with his coat-sleeves spotted by various chemicals; and Moronval in a black coat very white in the seams, and a white cravat very black in the folds; several "children of the sun,"—the everlasting Japanese prince, and the Egyptian from the banks of the Nile. What a strange ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... the imagination has its use, it has its abuse also. If visions of truth and beauty can exalt, visions of vice can debase and degrade. In that picture where Faust and Satan battle together for the scholar's soul, the angels share in the conflict. Plucking the roses of Paradise, they fling them over the battlements down upon the heads of the combatants. When the roses fall on Faust they heal his wounds; when they fall on Satan they turn into coals of ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... all heart!" murmured Felix. He struck an attitude, and sang with exquisite feeling the opening bars of the Jewel Song from "Faust." As applied to the earthly tabernacle of madame's generous soul, the effect of that impassioned address was ludicrous. But Felix recked little of that. He threw the hundred-franc note on ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... has dined well, and his big hand is stroking the Essence of Selfishness who purrs against his medalled chest under a caress as gentle as a woman's. He sings his favourite airs from "Faust" and "Aida" with gusto, and roars over the gallant stories of his aide-de-camp, who, being from the south of La belle France, is never at a loss for a tale—tales that make the general's medals twinkle merrily in the firelight. It is my ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith

... Yankee band-master; and then it was assured that the much advertised composer was a joking American masquerading as a Slav, possibly the vender of some new religious cure born in the fanatical bake-ovens of Western America. "Faust" alternated with "Les Huguenots" at the Opera, Pilsner beer was on tap at the Cafe Monferino—why worry over exotic stories told of this visitor's abnormal musical powers? And little did anyone surmise that ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... crisis over, then commenced the most heartrending labor at which I have ever been present," and she pictures him to us agonized, for days and weeks, running after the bits of lost inspiration. Goethe, likewise, in a letter to Humboldt regarding his Faust, which occupied him for sixty years, full of interruptions and gaps: "The difficulty has been to get through strength of will what is really to be gotten only by a spontaneous act of nature." Zola, according to his biographer, Toulouse, "imagines a novel, always ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... (1) Faust, Albert B. The German Element in the United States. With special reference to its political, moral, social, and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... glanced at it for a moment and listened with intensity for the beat of horse's hoofs, and her wakeful imagination created a sound that was non-existent in her ears. With it she heard a gallop that was spectral as the gallop of the black horses which carried Mephistopheles and Faust to the abyss. It died away almost at once, and she knew it for an imagination. To-night she was peopling the desert with phantoms. Even the fires of the nomads were as the fires that flicker in an abode of witches, the shadows that passed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... Alleluia Chorus. I have borrowed words from the Angel Song at the opening of "Faust" for my score. But the music has an expression of its own, and the words are feeble; and the only comfort is, that these words will be lost in the triumph strain of the tones that ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... being reminded, as I looked at him, of another black poodle, which Faust entertained for a short time with unhappy results, and I thought that a very moderate degree of incantation would be enough to bring the fiend out ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... to Mr. Bayard Taylor for his translation of "Faust," which occupies the same place, as regards German Poetry, that Mr. Bryant's translation of Homer does to Greek Poetry. The difficulty of the task which Mr. Taylor set himself, the task of rendering the original in the measures of the original, was never met before by any English translator ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... and singing, and bowing to one another; little children were going together with flowers in their hands, singing, and answering the tones of the great bells; and one little child, as it passed, looked right up at the great Doctor Faust, and held out its white lily. The bells chimed, and the ...
— Child Stories from the Masters - Being a Few Modest Interpretations of Some Phases of the - Master Works Done in a Child Way • Maud Menefee

... Massachusetts, the Manchester of America, and a place where we might expect every thing in the shape of manufactures except classical books. Yet it rejoices in a publisher who has really done much for good literature. If our readers will look at their American editions of Faust, of Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, of Southey's Chronicle of the Cid, they will find Mr. Bixby on the title page, and Lowell as the city whence their treasures came. We have now to chronicle another feat of the same enterprising publisher—an edition of Milton, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by Shakespeare. What most impressed the author of "Faust" in the work of Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the author of "Manfred" is proof enough to consign his best work to the second or third class at most. "How greatly it is all planned!" the first requisite of all great work, and one of which the highest genius possible ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... than that of the greatest of the men concerned in the administration of it, which constitutes on large element in an Englishman's respect for the law. At times this automatic power, which has been thus created Faust-like, by reason of the impossibility of pre-adapting its mechanism to the exigences of every case, works to unforseen and undesired ends—sometimes even to absurd ones. And, with thinkers of a certain phase of modern thought, it has been a favourite taunt against the average British ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... to recite a few lines from "Dr. Faustus" for our instruction and pleasure, and forthwith he gave the soliloquy of Faust, waiting at midnight for Lucifer to carry him to hell, the terrified ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... period, that of Faust, or Dr. Faustus, has obtained the most lasting popularity. There are good reasons for believing that the hero of this tale was a real personage, who lived in Suabia in the early part of the sixteenth century. He is frequently mentioned as a well-known ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... found in the girl with the golden eyes that seraglio which a loving woman knows how to create and which a man never refuses. Paquita responded to that passion which is felt by all really great men for the infinite—that mysterious passion so dramatically expressed in Faust, so poetically translated in Manfred, and which urged Don Juan to search the heart of women, in his hope to find there that limitless thought in pursuit of which so many hunters after spectres have started, which wise men think to discover in science, and ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... tradition continues that John Faust, of Mayence ... became acquainted with Castaldi, and passed some time with him, at his Scriptorium,... ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... and Micromegas Goethe's Faust, and Autobiography Thackeray's Vanity Fair Pendennis Dickens' Pickwick David Copperfield Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii George Eliot's Adam Bede Kingsley's Westward Ho! ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock



Words linked to "Faust" :   character, fictional character



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com