Nothing is more certain than that a devout girl who does the work of the flesh with her lover feels a hundred times more pleasure than a girl who is without prejudices. This truth is too much in the nature of things for me to think it necessary to prove it to my reader.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (11, 3)
He does not say that it consists in a series of generations from father to son, of which he himself is the latest heir; he makes light of genealogies. He defines the gentleman by saying that he is a man who demands respect and who believes that there is no way to be respected but to respect others, to live decently, to deceive no one, never to lie when the person who is listening to him believes that he is speaking sincerely, and to put his honor above his life.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (11, 3)
Strange necessity for a master in Russia; when the occasion arises, he has to beat his servant! Words have no effect; nothing but stirrup leathers produce one. The servant, whose soul is only that of a slave, reflects after the beating, and says: 'My master has not dismissed me, he would not have beaten me if he did not love me, so I ought to be attached to him. '
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (10, 6)
In my longer career as a libertine, during which my invincible inclination for the fair sex led me to employ every method of seduction, I turned the heads of several hundred women whose charms had overwhelmed my reason; but what was always my best safeguard is that I was always careful not to attack novices, girls whose moral principles or whose prejudices were an obstacle to success, except in the company of another woman.
I early learned that what arouses resistance in a young girl, what makes it difficult to seduce her, is lack of courage; whereas when she is with a female friend she gives in quite easily; the weakness of the one brings about the fall of the other. Fathers and mothers believe the contrary, but they are mistaken. They commonly refuse to entrust their daughter to a young man, whether for a ball or a walk; but they yield of the girl has one of her friends as a chaperone. I repeat for their benefit: they are mistaken; for if the young man knows how to go about it their daughter is lost. A false shame prevents both girls alike from offering an absolute resistance to seduction, and as soon as the first step has been taken the fall comes inevitably and quickly.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (8, 4)
A people without superstition would be philosophical and philosophers will never obey. The people can be happy only if they are crushed, downtrodden, kept in chains.
[To Voltaire] Your first passion is love of humanity. That love blinds you. Love humanity, but you can only love it as it is. It is incapable of the benefits you would lavish upon it; and, giving them, you would only make it more unhappy and more wicked. Leave it the monster which devours it; the monster is dear to it. I never laughed so much as when I saw Don Quixote having a very hard time defending himself from the galley slaves to whom he had just magnanimously given their freedom.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (6, 10)
I forgot that is impossible to feel nothing but friendship for a woman whom one thinks pretty, whom one sees constantly, and whom one suspects of being in love. Friendship at its apogee becomes love, and, relieving itself by the same sweet mechanism which love needs to make itself happy, it rejoices to have become stronger after the fond act. A Platonist who maintains that one can be merely the friend of a pleasing young woman with whom one lives is a visionary.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (6, 7)
Those who laugh much are better off than those who laugh little, for gaiety unloads the spleen and generates good blood.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (5, 6)
I had read the great book of experience and I had learned from it that great enterprises were not to be talked about but executed, though with due regard for the power which Fortune exercises over all the undertakings of men.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (4, 14)
I constantly commend myself to the mercy of God. Those freethinkers who say that the prayer is of no use do not know what they are talking about. I know that after praying to God I always felt stronger; and that is enough to prove its usefulness, whether the increase in strength comes directly from God or is a physical result of one's confidence in him.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (4, 13)
I have always believed that when a man takes it into his head to accomplish some project and pursues it to the exclusion of everything else, he must succeed in it despite all difficulties; such a man will become the Grand Vizier, he will become Pope, he will overthrow a monarchy, provided that he begins early; for the man who has reached the age which Fortune disdains no longer succeeds in any undertaking, and without her help one can hope for nothing. The thing is to count on her and at the same time to defy her reverses. By this is one of the most difficult of political calculations.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (4, 13)
Animal nature, which chemists call the "animal kingdom", instinctively secures the thee means necessary to perpetuate itself. They are three real needs. It must feed itself, and in order that doing so shall not be a labor, it has the sensation called 'appetite'; and it finds pleasure in satisfying it. In the second place it must preserve its own species by generation, and certainly it would not perform that duty - despite what St. Augustine says - if it did not find pleasure in doing it. In the third place it has an unconquerable inclination to destroy its enemy; and nothing is better contrived, for since it must preserve itself it must hate whatever achieves or desire it's destruction. Under this general law, however, each species acts independently. These three sensations - hunger, appetite for coitus, hate which tend to destroy the enemy - are habitual satisfactions in brute beasts, let us not call them pleasure, for, endowed with the faculty of reason, he foresees it, seeks it, creates it, and reasons about it after enjoying it. Let us examine the thing. Man is in the same condition as the beast when he yields to these three instincts without his reason entering in. When our mind makes its contribution, these three satisfactions become pleasure, pleasure, pleasure: the inexplicabile sensation which makes us taste what we call happiness, which we cannot explain either, although we feel it.
The voluptuary who who reasons disdain greediness, lust, and the brutal vengeance which springs from a first impulse of anger; he is an epicure; he falls in love but he does not wish to enjoy the object he loves unless he is sure that he is loved; when he is insulted, he will not avenge himself untill he has coldly arrived at the best way to relish the pleasure of his revenge. In the result he is more cruel, but he consoles himself by the knowledge that he is at least reasonable. These three operations are the work of the soul, which, to procure itself pleasure, becomes the minister of the passion. We beat hunger in order to savour culinary concoction better; we put off the pleasure of love in order to make it more intense; and we defer a vengeance in order to make it more deadly. Yet it is true that people often die of indigestion, that we deceive ourselves or allow ourselves to be deceived in love by sophisms, and that the object we wish to exterminate often escapes our vengeance; but we run these risks willingly.
Giacomo Casanova - The history of my life (4, 2)
After all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he has physically enjoyed her chasms. An ugly woman of brilliant intelligence makes a man fall so much in love that she leaves him feeling no lack.
Ask a beautiful woman who is not very intelligent if she would give some small part of her beauty for a little more intelligence. If she is frank she will say that she is satisfied and what she has. Why is she satisfied? Because, having only a little, she can have no notion of the intelligence she lack. Ask an ugly but inteligent woman if she would change places with the other. She will answer no. Why? Because, having a great deal of intelligence, she knows that it serves her for everything.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (3, 3)
When we suffer, we gain the pleasure of hoping for the end of our suffering; and we are never wrong, for we have at least the resource of sleep, in which good dreams console and soothe us; and when we are happy, the thought that our happiness will be followed by misery never comes to trouble us. Pleasure, then, when it is present, is always pure; pain is always tempered.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)
This does the poor philosopher reason when he undertakes to reason at moments when a tumultuous passion leads the divine faculties of his soul astray. To reason rightly one must be neither in love nor in anger; for those two passions reduce as to the level of animals; and unfortunately we are never so much inclined to reason as when we are agitated by one or the other of them.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)
Belief in Eternal Providence on the part of most of those who live by practices forbidden by laws or religion is neither absurd nor feigned nor the fruit of hypocrisy; it is true, real, and, such as it is, pious, for its source is unimpeachable. Whatever ways it takes, it is always Providence which acts, and those who worship it regardless of everything else can only be good souls though guilty of sinning.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)
Those who say that life is only a combination of misfortunes mean that the life itself is a misfortune. If it is a misfortune, then death is a happiness. Such purple did not write on good health, with their purses stuffed with money, and contentment in their souls from having held Cecilias and Marinas in their arms and being sure that there were more of them to come. Such men are a race of pessimists which can have existed only among ragged philosophers and rascally and atrabilious theologians. If pleasures exists, and we can only enjoy it in life, then life is a happiness. There are misfortunes, of course, as I should be the first to know. But the very existence of these misfortunes proves that the sum of good is greater. I'm infinitely happy when I am in dark room and see the light coming through a window which opens in a vast horizon.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)
Her anxiety pleased me, and I amused myself by assuring her that virginity on girls seemed to me only childish imagination, since nature had not even given most of them the token of it. I ridiculed those who only too often made the mistake of chiding them on the subject.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)
Leave him to his error. That is better than to convince him he is wrong, and make an enemy of him.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (1, 9)
... and for lost courage there is no remedy. It cannot be recovered. The mind succumbs to an apathy against which nothing avails.
Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (1, 9)