Why This Is Hell Nor Am

Spoken by Mephistopheles in Scene 3 of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), when Faustus demands to know why the demon appears on earth rather than confined in hell. The answer is a thunderbolt of existential philosophy: hell is not a location but a state of being that the damned carry everywhere. Marlowe's Mephistopheles thereby tells Faustus the truth plainly — a warning the scholar is too intoxicated by ambition to heed. John Milton later echoed the idea in Paradise Lost: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell."