Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition.

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.

I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

And when you love someone you don’t always see them realistically.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.

As long as we love, we lend to the beloved object qualities of mind and heart which we deprive him of when the day of misunderstanding arrives.

Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.

I do find it sometimes that people project their own feelings on to the characters and I think that there is a certain amount of sexism - I mean the proprietary nature, for men and women.

Feelings change facts.

Problems are rarely as bad as we think-or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.

Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea: and can any idea exist out of the mind?

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--But how could I forget thee?

I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.