Giacomo Casanova Quotes

The longer you remain in Rome,' said [Cardinal] S.C., ‘the smaller you will find it.

Happy are those lovers who when their senses require rest can fall back upon the intellectual enjoyments afforded by the mind! Sweet sleep then comes and lasts until the body has recovered its general harmony. On awaking the senses are again active and always ready to resume their action.

Love is a great poet its resources are inexhaustible but if the end it has in view is not obtained it feels weary and remains silent.

Love becomes imprudent only when it is impatient to enjoy; but when it is a matter of procuring the return of a happiness to which a baleful combination of circumstances has raised impediments, love sees and foresees all that the most subtle perspicacity can discover.

What do you want to say to me?’‘Nothing—just to talk about the profession I am entering. I am about to practice virtue in order to find a man who loves it only to destroy it' [replied Mademoiselle Vesian.]‘That is it exactly; and believe me, everything in this life is much the same. We refer everything to ourselves, and each of us is a tyrant. That is why the best of mortals is he who is tolerant.

I have never done anything in my life except try to make myself ill when I had my health and try to make myself well when I had lost it. I have been equally and thoroughly successful in both, and today in that particular I enjoy perfect health, which I wish I could ruin again; but age prevents me.

They [his readers, whom he asks to be his friends] will find that I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms” (Casanova, p.34, Vol 1 Preface).

Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.