Love Quote by Giacomo Casanova

Casanova doesn’t defend deceit so much as he shrugs at it, and that shrug is the tell. “Let it pass” is a moral sleight of hand: a command to drop the charge before the evidence is even weighed. The line works because it reframes exploitation as symmetry. If everyone is duping everyone, then no one is truly guilty; desire becomes a get-out-of-ethics card.

The specific intent is reputational self-defense dressed up as worldly wisdom. Casanova, the celebrity libertine of 18th-century Europe, knows the audience he’s writing for: readers who want scandal without consequence, romance with plausible deniability. By invoking “as a general rule,” he launderes private conduct into anthropology. It’s not him; it’s human nature. That rhetorical move turns a particular history of men holding social and economic leverage over women into a supposedly even match of tricks and counter-tricks.

The subtext is colder than the languid phrasing suggests. “When love is in the way” sounds like tenderness, but it’s really a claim about impaired judgment: love makes people credulous, so deception is practically inevitable. That inevitability doubles as permission. He’s saying the con is part of the courtship contract, a mutually agreed-upon theater where both sides exaggerate, omit, and perform.

Context matters: Casanova’s era treated seduction as both art and sport, with women’s reputations and futures more precarious than men’s. His line flattens that asymmetry into a fashionable cynicism, converting power into “play” and harm into a witty moral draw.