It was Shakespeare who coined the phrase regarding love’s indifference to what we directly perceive with our senses but his intention was more to indicate that everything we do, no less – those deep visceral and emotional facts of our lives, are first and foremost mental phenomena.
I love not what I see but what I believe I see and the effect on perception by expectation being what it is, this forms a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop. Material beauty has a role to play but only a fool (or a poet) might ever believe that there was not some other, deeper meaning at work here.
Daedelus Kite 