Top 100 Giacomo Casanova Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be the flame, not the moth.”

— Giacomo Casanova

2. “Marriage is the tomb of love.”

— Giacomo Casanova

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

— Giacomo Casanova

4. “I don’t conquer, I submit.”

— Giacomo Casanova

5. “The sweetest pleasures are those which are hardest to be won.”

— Giacomo Casanova

6. “Love is three quarters curiosity.”

— Giacomo Casanova

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7. “There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

— Giacomo Casanova

8. “Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty.”

— Giacomo Casanova

9. “I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.”

— Giacomo Casanova

10. “To Kiss : An attempt to absorb the essence of the other person.”

— Giacomo Casanova

11. “Those who do not love life do not deserve it.”

— Giacomo Casanova

12. “It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless.”

— Giacomo Casanova

13. “One who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.”

— Giacomo Casanova

14. “I 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 its charms.”

— Giacomo Casanova

15. “Nobody can deprive me of the fact that I had a good time.”

— Giacomo Casanova

16. “When a man gets it into his head to do something, and when he exclusively occupies himself in that design, he must succeed, whatever the difficulties. That man will become Grand Vizier or Pope.”

— Giacomo Casanova

17. “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.”

— Giacomo Casanova

18. “A man who makes known his love by words is a fool.”

— Giacomo Casanova

19. “The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.”

— Giacomo Casanova

20. “The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.”

— Giacomo Casanova

21. “If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.”

— Giacomo Casanova

22. “I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.”

— Giacomo Casanova

23. “Man is a free agent; but he is not free if he does not believe it, for the more power he attributes to Destiny, the more he deprives himself of the power which God granted him when he gave him reason.”

— Giacomo Casanova

24. “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.”

— Giacomo Casanova

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

— Giacomo Casanova

26. “The same principle that forbids me to lie does not allow me to tell the truth.”

— Giacomo Casanova

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

— Giacomo Casanova

28. “The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.”

— Giacomo Casanova

29. “There is no honest woman with an uncorrupted heart whom a man is not sure of conquering by dint of gratitude. It is one of the surest and shortest means.”

— Giacomo Casanova

30. “After all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he had physically enjoyed her charms.”

— Giacomo Casanova

31. “My great treasure is that I am my own master, that I am not dependent upon anyone, and that I am not afraid of misfortunes.”

— Giacomo Casanova

32. “The thing is to dazzle.”

— Giacomo Casanova

33. “The man who forgets does not forgive, he only loses the remembrance; forgiveness is the offspring of a noble heart, of a generous mind, whilst forgetfulness is only the result of a weak memory, or of an easy carelessness.”

— Giacomo Casanova

34. “The pleasure I gave my lovers was a four fifth of the pleasure I experienced.”

— Giacomo Casanova

35. “The man who has sufficient power over himself to wait until his nature has recovered its even balance is the truly wise man, but such beings are seldom met with.”

— Giacomo Casanova

36. “If you want to make people laugh, your face must remain serious.”

— Giacomo Casanova

37. “Love is only a feeling of curiousity more or less intense, grafted upon the inclination placed in us by nature that the species may be preserved.”

— Giacomo Casanova

38. “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.”

— Giacomo Casanova

39. “Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion.”

— Giacomo Casanova

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

— Giacomo Casanova

41. “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.”

— Giacomo Casanova

42. “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.”

— Giacomo Casanova

43. “In the mean time I worship God, laying every wrong action under an interdict which I endeavour to respect, and I loathe the wicked without doing them any injury.”

— Giacomo Casanova

44. “Cheating is a sin, but honest cunning is simply prudence. It is a virtue. To be sure, it has a likeness to roguery, but that cannot be helped. He who has not learned to practice it is a fool.”

— Giacomo Casanova

45. “As to the deceit perpetrated upon women, let it pass, for, when love is in the way, men and women as a general rule dupe each other.”

— Giacomo Casanova

46. “Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.”

— Giacomo Casanova

47. “Beauty without wit offers nothing but the enjoyment of its material charms, whilst witty ugliness captivates by the charms of the mind, and at last fulfils all the desires of the man it has captivated.”

— Giacomo Casanova

48. “I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian.”

— Giacomo Casanova

49. “As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.”

— Giacomo Casanova

50. “When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.”

— Giacomo Casanova