Lou Andreas-Salomé Quotes

His gaze lit upon a lovely girl who was just crossing the street diagonally, carefully lifting her skirt as she did so as to reveal a pair of charming little ankle boots. He had to smile about the about childish impatience of his desire to deck Marfa out like this until she too was a lovely girl -- bring her out of her dour shell. But Marfa was not coming. -- ("A Reunion"), p. 103

"No! No! Not one! Never just one! Even the wisest judgment can become unjust, willful, arrogant, when measured against life. And the worst -- you see -- the worst thing under the sun -- is the violation of one person by another." -- Anneliese, p. 117

It was in September, the quietest time of year in Paris. The world of rank and fashion hid in the seaside resorts; visitors were being scared away in droves by the stifling heat. Nevertheless, the crowds that flooded the boulevards in the close evening air were so large and checkered that it would have looked like high season in any other city. (p. 3)

The optimistic nature finds joy in the very feeling for life; the pessimistic nature finds a feeling for life only in joy.

You can tackle the problem of the erotic however you want, but you will always feel that you have done so very one-sidedly, especially if you tackle it by means of logic -- that is, from the outside. (p. 184)

[Russia's God] cannot prevent or improve all things; he can only represent closeness and intimacy for all time . . . This all-pervasive sense of security, this omnipresence, leads to a confidence in the surroundings, whatever they may be, and it presupposes an untorn integration with one’s childhood, within the unity of the womb. It was exactly that childlike purity and the primitiveness in basic outlook on life (so characteristic of the Russian spirit) that captured the imagination of the poet and was released in his language. It made possible the return to a kind of familiar divinity in mankind, as if Rilke were suddenly presented with the gift of the primal home and childhood he had been deprived of. Kindle pp. 33-4.

Mourning is not as singular a state of emotional preoccupation as is commonly thought: it is, more precisely, an incessant discourse with the departed one, in order to draw him nearer. For death entails not merely a disappearance but rather a transformation into a new realm of visibility. Something is not just taken away but is gained, in a way never before experienced. In the moment when the flowing lines of a figure’s constant change and effect become paralyzed for us, we are imbued for the first time with its essence: something which is never captured or fully realized in the normal course of lived existence. -- Kindle p. 26

"Conflicted creatures, that’s what we [parents] are — we give birth, without knowing to what; we educate, without knowing whom; we must answer for it, without knowing how; and we can give up neither our power nor our fear." -- Anneliese, p. 52

In the fusion of single cells . . . the two cells' nuclei totally merge with each other, forming the new creature, and only what is inessential, at the periphery of the old cell, disintegrates, dying off. It may well stem from such influence that . . . the total fusion of single-cell organisms corresponds allegorically to what, in the highest dreams of love, the mind imagines as the full joy of love. That is arguably why love is so easily associated with longing and trepidation about death, which are not even clearly differentiated from each other; with something like a primal dream in which oneself, one's lover, and their child could still be one, and just three names for the same immortality. (p. 191-92)

Hildegard sensed darkly that she would now at once have to spread two light gray wings and let them lift her up -- high, high, as in her dream. But she also sensed darkly how it is in feverish dreams: as though something in her were helplessly, powerlessly beating its wings -- and suddenly she didn't know whether she was flying -- or falling --. Then Dietrich drew the playing child to him. He looked at Hildegard, almost a bit timidly -- and at the same time gently kissed the child on his blond hair. And Hildegard slowly laid her hand in his. Reaching out over a paradise. -- ("Paradise"), p. 132

For the angels [of the Duino Elegies] are not intermediaries, and that is important. For him there were no mediating saints or redeemers, although the name of the angels may have come from his Catholic childhood. For him God remained for all time the designation for the all-embracing unity. If in The Book of Hours God is addressed only as a “neighbor,” it is because the slightest removal from him would pose an absolute and hopelessly insurmountable distance. What is presented here, instead, before the dominion of the heavens over the earth, is the horizon of angels, an optically unifying illusion. -- Kindle p. 85

"Oh, the mountains!" she said in her soft voice, and the indeterminate color of her eyes seemed to grow darker. "I used to love the plains, that's where I'm from. And it is beautiful there, too, where it is boundless, or at least appears to be so. But when people come to the plains, they immediately become human themselves, serving people, and they're no longer untouched and unapproachable. It occurs to me now that's why the mountains have the effect they do. As if one were seeing nature itself as it rises above all that's human and looks down upon it. No matter how many small settlements might grow among them, they still retain something so primeval." -- Anjuta ("Incognito"), p. 135

You also write: you had always thought that such complete devotion to purely intellectual goals was only meant to be a "transition" for me. What do you mean by "transition"? If other goals stand behind it, for which I must give up the most glorious and difficult thing on Earth, namely freedom, then I want to stay in this transition, because I won't give that up.

The man that we love, regardless of the exalted state of both his spirit and his soul, remains a priest in his robes who only vaguely guesses what he is celebrating.

"But this danger you mention?" he went on. "Tell me, where is there beauty that isn't at the same time in danger? -- and when wasn't the greatest beauty also the greatest danger! -- And mind you: this know-it-all attitude and drive to control, the 'firm hand' you were talking about -- all that arrogance, especially of the usual, masculine kind, will go to pieces trying to deal with this! That approach is only best right from the start and with women who are no threat to anyone. But -- please tell me -- what's so great about a manly stance that has to look out for itself, that's so anxiously self-defensive?" -- Marcus, p. 180