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'.
So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.
There are as many loves as there are hearts.
Prayer is first and foremost an act of love
Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.
He painted me when I was young because he was in love with me, but now that he has loved me he doesn't paint me anymore.
Physics is not the most important thing. Love is.
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