Literary theory Quote by Rita Felski

“The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe’s Faust , so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and…

— Robert Aickman

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

— Woody Allen

“Dandies, who – as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment…

— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

Upon the publication of Goethe's epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to…

— Anonymous

“Mephistopheles' contentious, often ambiguous relationship to Faustus is a reference to tantra just as it is to alchemy. It resembles the shifting tactics of…

— Ramona Fradon

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

— Boris Pasternak

“Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very…

— Roland Barthes

Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as…

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.

— Mason Cooley

“Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its…

— E.A. Bucchianeri

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it.…

— Henry David Thoreau

“Eighteenth-century German poet and philosopher, Wolfgang Von Goethe wrote: Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always…

— Verusha Singh