Giacomo Casanova Quotes

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

I have often met with happiness after some imprudent step which ought to have brought ruin upon me, and although passing a vote of censure upon myself I would thank God for his mercy.

The thing is to dazzle

The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.

The spirit of rebellion is present in every great city, and the great task of wise government is to keep it dormant, for if it wakes it is a torrent which no dam can hold back.

Thence, I suppose, my natural disposition to make fresh acquaintances, and to break with them so readily, although always for a good reason, and never through mere fickleness.

Should I perchance still feel after my death, I would no longer have any doubt, but I would most certainly give the lie to anyone asserting before me that I was dead.

I have met with some of them - very honest fellows, who, with all their stupidity, had a kind of intelligence and an upright good sense, which cannot be the characteristics of fools.

I have loved women even to madness, but I have always loved liberty better.

The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

I found that the writer who says SUBLATA LUCERNA NULLUM DISCRIMEN INTER MULIERES ('when the lamp is taken away, all women are alike') says true; but without love, this great business is a vile thing.

economy spoils pleasure

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it.

God, great principle of all minor principles, God, who is Himself without a principle, could not conceive Himself, if, in order to do it, He required to know His own principle.

I always made my food congenial to my constitution, and my health was always excellent.

I am bound to add that the excess in too little has ever proved in me more dangerous than the excess in too much; the last may cause indigestion, but the first causes death.

We avenge intelligence when we deceive a fool, and the victory is worth the trouble

We avenge intellect when we dupe a fool, and it is a victory not to be despised for a fool is covered with steel and it is often very hard to find his vulnerable part.

Man is free; but not unless he believes he is[.]

Hatred, in the course of time, kills the unhappy wretch who delights in nursing it in his bosom.

[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.

They are the follies inherent to youth; I make sport of them, and, if you are kind, you will not yourself refuse them a good-natured smile.

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

You will be amused when you see that I have more than once deceived without the slightest qualm of conscience, both knaves and fools.

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable.

I loved, I was loved, my health was good, I had a great deal of money, and I spent it, I was happy and I confessed it to myself.

God ceases to be God only for those who can admit the possibility of His non-existence, and that conception is in itself the most severe punishment they can suffer.

Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it[.

I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence, I know likewise that I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel.

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

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.

From that moment our love became sad, and sadness is a disease which gives the death-blow to affection.

It is always easy to break one’s word to oneself.

lies, truth, loveI have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of it's charms.