"Casanova" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibanez's mere energy would have produced interesting things if it had not found such easy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like that for a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirs equal to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenly without resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all you have is ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, a clever Venetian adventurer and scandalous impostor, of the Cagliostro type, who insinuated himself into the good graces for a time of all the distinguished people of the period, including even Frederick the Great, Voltaire, and others; died in Bohemia after endless ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... father for the army, while his mother desired that he should become a minister of the Lutheran Church, he was educated at the College of Strasbourg in languages and mathematics. Subsequently he chose his own profession, studying under Tischbein the elder, then under Vanloo and Francesco Casanova; the latter, a painter of battle pieces after the style of Bourgognone. By his landscapes exhibited at the Louvre, De Loutherbourg acquired fame in Paris, and in 1763 was elected a member of the French Academy of Painting, being then eight years below the prescribed age for admission ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Margot Asquith's Autobiography. Answer: much that is interesting. When we read an autobiography we are interested in the people written about rather than in the writer. There are exceptions, of course; for example, Henry Adams and Jacques Casanova. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... such organizations as Gasparino describes; they are men of the physical and moral nature of Casanova and the Regent of Orleans. Rodrigo's beauty was noted by many of his contemporaries even when he was pope. In 1493 Hieronymus Portius described him as follows: "Alexander is tall and neither light nor dark; his eyes are black and his lips somewhat full. His health is robust, and he is ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... the Trastevere district sketching with ferocious rapidity the attitudes and gestures of the vivacious population. A man after Stendhal's heart, this Spaniard. And in view of his private life one is tempted to add—and after the heart, too, of Casanova. Notwithstanding, he was an unrivalled interpreter of child-life. Some of his painted children are of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... estate was granted to his widow Elizabeth. He left four children, Thomas Chippendale III., John, Charles and Mary. He was one of the assignees in bankruptcy of the notorious Theresa Cornelys of Soho Square, of whom we read in Casanova and other scandalous chronicles of the time. Thomas Chippendale III. succeeded to the business of his father and grandfather, and for some years the firm traded under the style of Chippendale & Haig. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... given to this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova, an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always kept on singing. His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... but as you will presently see, that is not possible if I am to make myself intelligible. And I find that the more I write of myself the more I am affected by the same poor itch for self-exposure which has made Pepys and Casanova and Rousseau famous, and ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the story as a whole to the personality of the eponymous hero. Three widely-differing historical individuals are suggested as having contributed to the composite portrait. Best known of these was that very prince among adventurers, G. J. Casanova de Seingalt, a man who in the latter half of the eighteenth century played the part of adventurer—and generally that of the successful adventurer—in most of the European capitals; who within the first five-and-twenty years of his life had been 'abbe, secretary to Cardinal Aquaviva, ensign, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of my greatest treasures. It is the Clavicula Salomonis; and I have much reason to believe that it is the identical copy which belonged to the greatest adventurer of the eighteenth century, Jacques Casanova. You will see that the owner's name had been cut out, but enough remains to indicate the bottom of the letters; and these correspond exactly with the signature of Casanova which I have found at the Bibliotheque Nationale. ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... because he drank wine or took drugs. All that has been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But in a much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The world makes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurd amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness. They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly "good." Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man. He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less. He was ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already, at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova —a certain Buonaccorso Pitti, who, in the course of his incessant journeys as merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant, Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... dimly what a wonderful chance this new fashionable craze—for so he regarded it—gives to the charlatan. He had always felt an attraction to that extraordinary eighteenth century adventurer, Cagliostro, and to-night he suddenly remembered a certain passage in Casanova's memoirs.... He felt rather sorry that they hadn't planned out this—this seance, before the rest of the party had arrived. He could have given Bubbles a few "tips" which would have made her task easy, and the coming seance ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... reported to the police superintendent of the district, and it transpired that not less than ten or eleven little girls of the quarter had been thus led astray. From time to time he invited into the house a number of good-for-nothings of the same stamp as himself, and here this youthful Casanova organised pleasure-parties of a kind usually unknown to those of his age. The lad was bound over to come up for trial if called upon. Such cases as this are commoner than is generally believed; and perhaps commoner in the country ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... the moral sense is sometimes obtunded, if not altogether absent. Sallust, Seneca, and Bacon were suspected felons. Rousseau, Byron, Foscolo, and Caresa were grossly immoral, while Casanova, the gifted mathematician, was a common swindler. Murat, Rousseau, Clement, Diderot, Praga, and Oscar Wilde ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... capital, from there came the new foes, who wore such handsome red caps when on duty, as resplendent as officers with their black velvet lapels and the gold rosettes and winged wheels. They were the young railroad officials, pupils and assistants, and each one was the Casanova of his district! In those small places there were no other uniforms, and what was the bouquet on Florian's hat worth, compared with those caps with gold braid and rosette! They took away his Lisi, Marianne at St. Martin, and the passionate beauty Resele in the little ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... a celebrity. For a number of years, we, being diligent in our business, stood and waited before kings in a celebrated book shop. Now (like Casanova, retired from the world of our triumphs and adventures) we compose our memoirs. "We know from personal experience that a slight tale, a string of gossip, will often alter our entire conception of a personality,"—from a contemporary book review. This, the high office of tittle-tattle, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... and Suetonius in Latin, Athenaeus with his supper conversations in Greek, especially drawing her attention to his chapter on boy love, Boccaccio and Casti in Italian, the uncastrated editions, the adventures of Casanova, and the hundreds of other French bawdy books, with the most exciting illustrations of all these works and many others besides. The lecture on them always led to good fucking in one aperture or the other, practising the particular description ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... entitled, Jeanne de Naples; an opera-comique in three acts, the book by De Leuven and Brunswick, the music by Monpon and Bordese, produced in 1840; an Italian tragedy, La Regina Griovanna, by the Marquis of Casanova, written about 1840; an Italian opera, the libretto by Ghislanzoni, who is known as the librettist of Aida, the music by Petrella (Milan, 1875); a play in verse by Brunetti, called Griovanna I di Napoli (Naples, 1881); a Hungarian play by Rakosi, Johanna es Endre, and lastly ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... for having begot a child upon the latter's wife; and with de Bernis had not dissimilar ties, for the Marquis de Soyecourt had in Venice, in 1749, relinquished to him the beautiful nun of Muran, Maria Montepulci,—which lady de Bernis subsequently turned over to Giacomo Casanova, as is duly recorded in the latter's Memoires, under the year 1753.] just as he had been. Truly, it was diverting, after a candid appraisal of his own merits, to reflect that a dwarfish Louis de Soyecourt had ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the more private papers of the State, was deposited in a room on the second floor of the Ducal Palace. Many of the criminal records belonging to the Council of Ten were stored in the Piombi under the roof of the Palace; and the famous adventurer Casanova relates how he beguiled some of his prison hours by reading the trial of a Venetian nobleman, which he found among other papers piled at the end of the corridor where he was allowed to take exercise. Soon after the fall of the Republic, the following disposition of the papers was made. ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various |
