“Love in full life and length, not love ideal,No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name,But something better still, so very real...”

“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”

“There can be no love unless there is faith which means a feeling or vision of the ideal's beauty and this ultimately depends upon what intrinsic beauty the ideal has. The nearer an ideal is to Beauty of Consciousness, the greater the possibility of our loving it completely and passionately loving it”

“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.”

“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.”