Time & Perspective Quote by Giacomo Casanova

Casanova is selling you a moral makeover with the sly confidence of a man who knows his reputation has arrived before he has. The line performs piety as a kind of social insurance: he "worship[s] God" while carefully itemizing the terms under which he can still be Casanova. That bureaucratic word, "interdict", is the tell. He frames ethics not as an inner transformation but as a set of prohibitions he "endeavour[s] to respect" - an aspirational loophole baked into the grammar. It's less confession than contract language.

The subtext is reputational triage. Casanova, the celebrity adventurer, is constantly negotiating between libertine appetite and a Europe still organized by churchly authority and elite patronage. He can't afford to sound openly immoral; he also can't credibly pretend to be a saint. So he offers a third posture: devout in theory, disciplined in intention, and crucially, non-violent in practice. "I loathe the wicked without doing them any injury" positions him as a civilized judge, above vengeance, even as "loathe" smuggles in the pleasure of condemnation. He gets to enjoy moral superiority without paying the cost of moral action.

What makes the sentence work is its strategic humility. "In the mean time" lowers the stakes, implying a temporary, practical virtue while life continues. It's the Casanova brand in miniature: charm plus self-justification, sin managed with etiquette. He invites the reader to admire his restraint while leaving open the possibility that restraint is simply another seduction technique - aimed not at lovers, but at history.