I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead ofnearer to it — at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!

*It’s sad. Love looks like a nice thing, but it’s actually very rough when you experience it.*

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much more terrible than death, from death does not prevent the Beloved from having lived.
That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

Love is like whoa! Actually, it's closer to woe.

You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you.

The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery.

Love is action. It isn't just talk, and it never was.

Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.

Love is the opposite of good sense.

Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

Ah, cruel 'tis to love,
And cruel not to love,
But cruelest of all
To love and love in vain.

"Ah!" he said. "Love, that terrible thing!"

The worst thing about love between human beings is that when you are prepared to love them they don't want it; when they do its you who can't bear the idea.