To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Interpretation
Love can cloud our perception, making us idealize the person we are attracted to.
This quote by H. L. Mencken suggests that love can create a kind of blindness where we fail to see the reality of a person, seeing them instead as extraordinary or divine. It highlights the tendency of lovers to elevate their partners to a pedestal, obscuring their flaws and presenting them as idealized beings, which is often a temporary state caused by the intensity of romantic feelings.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion about the nature of romantic relationships.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment's glance.
Love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can't stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they'll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That's love, you see. It is redemptive.
We forget some of the oldest medicines we have are love and compassion, and they can be deployed by everyone.
If I belittle those whom I am called to serve, talk of their weak points in contrast perhaps with what I think of as my strong points; if I adopt a superior attitude, forgetting "Who made thee to differ? and what hast thou that thou hast not received?" then I know nothing of Calvary love.
A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.
Never's just the echo of forever, lonesome as a love that might have been. Let me go on lovin' and believin' 'til it's over. Please don't tell me how the story ends.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.