"Love is three quarters curiosity"
About this Quote
Giacomo Casanova, the 18th-century Venetian adventurer, reduces love to a proportion: three quarters curiosity. Coming from a man who moved deftly through salons, gambling houses, and masked balls, it is less a boast than a diagnosis. Desire quickens at the sight of what is not yet known. The other is a mystery of glances, stories, scars, habits; the mind leans forward, asking questions with the eyes before the mouth speaks. Curiosity animates courtship as an exploration, not a conquest, and Casanova understood that the chase is less about capture than discovery.
His world prized inquiry. The Enlightenment turned curiosity from a sin into a virtue; science, travel, and philosophy made knowing thrilling. He applied that spirit to intimacy. Seduction, for him, was attentiveness: he listened, noticed, read the room and the person. Love begins as a hunger to learn the contours of an unfamiliar soul, to map its weather, to be surprised. The lover becomes a kind of natural philosopher of another human being.
That does not mean curiosity is innocent. It can shade into intrusion or control, the fever of jealousy posing as vigilance. Curiosity can commodify the beloved, reducing a person to a series of revelations to be consumed. Casanova’s measure leaves room for the rest. If three quarters is curiosity, the remainder may be tenderness, courage, loyalty, the willingness to be known in return. Without those, curiosity burns bright and short; with them, it becomes a renewable source of wonder.
The aphorism also hints at how love endures. Long relationships falter where curiosity ends and certainty hardens into boredom. To keep asking, to let the partner be newly seen rather than summed up, is a form of care. The masks of Venice are always being lifted; there is always another layer, another season of a person to learn. Love, then, thrives less on possession than on sustained attention, the steady amazement that greets the familiar as if it were still strange.
His world prized inquiry. The Enlightenment turned curiosity from a sin into a virtue; science, travel, and philosophy made knowing thrilling. He applied that spirit to intimacy. Seduction, for him, was attentiveness: he listened, noticed, read the room and the person. Love begins as a hunger to learn the contours of an unfamiliar soul, to map its weather, to be surprised. The lover becomes a kind of natural philosopher of another human being.
That does not mean curiosity is innocent. It can shade into intrusion or control, the fever of jealousy posing as vigilance. Curiosity can commodify the beloved, reducing a person to a series of revelations to be consumed. Casanova’s measure leaves room for the rest. If three quarters is curiosity, the remainder may be tenderness, courage, loyalty, the willingness to be known in return. Without those, curiosity burns bright and short; with them, it becomes a renewable source of wonder.
The aphorism also hints at how love endures. Long relationships falter where curiosity ends and certainty hardens into boredom. To keep asking, to let the partner be newly seen rather than summed up, is a form of care. The masks of Venice are always being lifted; there is always another layer, another season of a person to learn. Love, then, thrives less on possession than on sustained attention, the steady amazement that greets the familiar as if it were still strange.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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