Love Quote by Giacomo Casanova

Casanova, professional seducer and unwilling moralist, smuggles a surprisingly conservative claim through the back door of libertine glamour: sex isn’t the enemy of “real love,” fantasy is. He’s reversing the pious hierarchy that treats desire as the cheap, corrupting appetizer to something purer. In his view, sensual pleasure is a kind of truth serum. It strips away projection, performance, and the flattering lies people tell themselves when they’re still in love with their own script.

The key word is “after.” Casanova isn’t romanticizing lust; he’s arguing that lust can be the audition. If tenderness survives the bodily fact of another person - their smell, their needs, their awkwardness, the morning-after reality - then it has earned the title “immortal.” That’s not sentimentality; it’s empiricism. Love that persists beyond gratification has passed the most unforgiving test: familiarity.

His jab at “mere fantasy” is also a jab at status love, literary love, salon love - the kind that thrives on distance, curated letters, and an audience. Eighteenth-century Europe was thick with performance: aristocratic manners, strategic marriages, reputations won and lost in conversation. Casanova knew how easily desire can be mistaken for an idea of someone. He’s warning that the hottest flame can be a paper fire: it burns bright precisely because it never has to live.

The intent, then, is self-justification with teeth. Casanova defends pleasure while insisting on a stricter standard than prudishness ever demands: if it can’t survive reality, it was never love, just theater.