Christopher Marlowe - placeholder

"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place; for where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be."

— Christopher Marlowe

Hell Hath No Limits Nor Is

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place; for where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be.

— Christopher Marlowe

About this quote

Spoken by Mephistopheles in Scene 3 of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), extending the previous declaration that hell travels with the damned. The passage expands the existential horror: hell has no circumference, no edge, no outside — wherever a lost soul stands, that is hell. Marlowe's demonology is unusually philosophical for Elizabethan drama, and this speech in particular anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre's twentieth-century formulation that hell is not a place of fire and brimstone but a condition of consciousness.

Source

Doctor Faustus, c. 1592