The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Interpretation
Love is often a reflection of our own minds and perceptions rather than an objective reality.
This quote by Arthur C. Clarke suggests that the person we believe we love is not a true representation of who they are, but rather how we perceive and project our feelings onto them. It implies that our understanding and expectations of love are shaped by our own thoughts and biases, which can distort the true essence of the other person.
In practice
During a relationship advice seminar.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Help People Know They're Loved (Part 2) Spend the rest of your life giving people back to themselves, that they might love themselves. And show them by how you are with them that you know there is nothing they are lacking, nothing they are missing, nothing they need, nothing they are not.
Have a great love for those who contradict and fail to love you, for in this way love is begotten in a heart that has no love.
Take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.
Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.
Someone who does not run toward the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives. But this dove here senses the love hawk floating above, and waits, and will not be driven or scared to safety.
To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness.
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