How few of us understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as we see someone as he or she really is, here and now, and not as they are in our memory or our desire or in our imagination or projection that we can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that we love but the idea that we have formed of this person, or this person as the object of our desire, and not as he or she is in themselves. The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping our desires, prejudices, memories, projections, selective way of looking ... a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism. When we set out to serve someone whom we have not taken the trouble to see, are we meeting that person's need or our own need?"
--- Father Anthony de Mello