Mephistopheles

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Railroad magnate and speculator Jay Gould was dubbed “the Mephistopheles of Wall Street” by ministers on the pulpit.

From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 2, 2025

Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.

From New York Times • Jun. 23, 2022

Rubbing his hands together, gleefully, like some kind of cut-rate Mephistopheles.

From The New Yorker • Oct. 28, 2019

Like Faust, he’s incessantly creative and ambitious; like Mephistopheles, he has in a sardonic eye for human vanity and striving.

From The Guardian • Jul. 16, 2018

The movements are respectively labelled Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles, the task, an impossibly tremendous one, being the embodiment in tones of the general characteristics of Goethe's poetic-philosophic master-work.

From Franz Liszt by Huneker, James