Allie; it is important to know what the deal was. Faust traded his soul for all that knowledge. And the quote from V has been tampered with historically. And they are plays, novels, operas and philosophical treatises…very complicated ones. In one version of the story Faust really thought he wanted Margaret to love him. That ended very badly.
“The story of Faust inspired a great deal of literature, music and illustration. Myriad diverse and often conflicting interpretations have been made of Faust Part Two (Jungian, Freudian, sociological, alchemical, Masonic, literary and classical to name but a few)
Although today many of the classical and Central European themes may be hard for the modern reader to grasp, the work remains a resonant parable on scientific learning and religion, passion and seduction, independence and love, as well as other subjects.
In poetic terms, Goethe places science and power in the context of a morally-interested metaphysics. Faust is a scientific empiricist who is forced to confront questions of good and evil, God and the devil, sexuality and mortality.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe’s_Faust