Love Quote by William Shakespeare

True love, Shakespeare implies, is less a candlelit glide path than a bruising obstacle course, and that’s exactly why it’s worth staging. The line lands in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy that treats romance like a high-stakes prank: lovers pair off, mispair, get drugged, humiliated, and still insist their feelings are destiny. Lysander’s complaint is funny because it’s true in the most inconvenient way. He’s not delivering a grand philosophy; he’s trying to make sense of why desire, which feels so private and pure, immediately collides with law, family, money, rivalry, and sheer bad timing.

The phrase “course” does heavy lifting. It turns love into a plotted route, suggesting intention and momentum, then punctures that confidence with “never did run smooth,” a plainspoken speed bump that sounds almost like an aphorism you’d mutter while picking yourself up. Shakespeare’s subtext is sly: we use love to narrate our lives as if it’s a coherent story, but the world refuses to honor that script. Even when love is “true,” it’s still forced to travel through messy systems and messy people.

In the play’s larger machinery, the line also functions as a permission slip for chaos. If love is inherently rough, then confusion isn’t a sign the relationship is wrong; it’s part of the genre. Comedy, here, isn’t the opposite of pain. It’s pain made survivable by wit, rhythm, and the promise that the bruises might rearrange into a happy ending.