Lou Andreas-Salomé Quotes

[Speaking of Rilke] Abandoning himself in everything, and thereby making himself superfluous, the benefactor becomes at once the petitioner, the recipients become donors, and he hides in their secure existence. And were this loner, who was isolated in death, still with us, I believe he would feel most immediately at home in the deepest anonymity of his work’s effects— there in the no longer audible processes of man’s union with the cosmos, where his form is allowed to fade and no longer requires visibility or the boundaries of self. Restored to a stronger presence: standing there, in deep peace, he too a nameless one among the nameless. -- Kindle p. 96

[On receiving the newly completed Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Duino Elegies] Ah слава Богу [Russian for thank God] dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you -- and yours to me! I sat and read and cried from joy, and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good. I remember as if it were today how much the beginning of the last Elegy plagued you, and when it had shaken me so severely, how even that plagued you; it has been on your lips for such long years; a word which one cannot make conscious and which is there all the same; in the beginning was this word. And then the Creature Elegy [the Eighth]! -- It is the poem of my most secret heart, oh so sayably glorious; and said, the inexpressible made present and actual. And that, finally is the message of this poetry: that we are surrounded, ringed by things of mute presence that are being rescued, redeemed into existence for us only thus, and yet it is these things alone by which we live. (p. 332-33)

Bear in mind that the Narcissus of legend gazed, not at a man-made mirror, but at the mirror of Nature [a pool of water]. Perhaps it was not just himself that he beheld in the mirror, but himself as if he were still All: would he not otherwise have fled, instead of lingering before it? And does not melancholy dwell next to enchantment upon his face? Only the poet can make a whole picture of this unity of joy and sorrow, departure from self and absorption in self, devotion and self-assertion.

"Do you know what love is? I mean the most profound thing about it? I will tell you: it is the mystery of completely sharing the experience of what is happening to the other person. As if hypnotized, as if replaced or exchanged with that other person, you follow the most subtle stirrings of that other person's soul, enjoying them, experiencing them, in that person. For that reason, they call love a kind of insanity or possession by the other. What is the result? The result is that both persons experience the same thing -- that they become identical, so to speak." ("Maidens' Roundelay") p. 50

The problem of the erotic is characterized by two things: for a start, it must be regarded as a special case within physical, psychic and social relations in general, and not, as often happens, as autocratically isolated. Rather, it relates all three of these kinds of problems to each other, and thus merges them into a single problem -- its problem. (p. 188)

"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

Conversing with Nietzsche is uncommonly lovely . . . The content of a conversation of ours really exists in what is not quite spoken but emerges from our each approaching the other half way. He gave me his hand and said earnestly and with feeling, "Never forget that it would be a calamity if you did not carve a memorial to your full innermost mind in the time left to you."

"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

"How do I imagine love? This is quite uncomplicated -- very simple and wholesome. I would compare it with things that are least demonic or romantic, like the daily bread that is blessed and stills our hunger, like the stream of air that comes into our home to refresh us. In one word, with that which is most important, most beautiful, and most natural, on which we most depend and about which we do not need to engage in empty rhetoric." -- (Fenitschka) p. 19

Our first experience is, remarkably, of a disappearance. A moment ago we were everything, undivided; any other being was indivisible from us - then we were urged into being born -- became a residual part of it all, which from then on would have to strive against even further diminution and to assert itself against a contrary world rising ever wider before it, into which it had fallen out of its fullness, as if into an -- at first depriving -- emptiness.

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

Slowly Ruth got up; an expression of utter surprise appeared on her face. Doubt, disbelief, even horror were mirrored in it. She felt as though she should call a distant friend, Erik, to come to her aid against this unknown assailant. But then she realized that it was he, it was Erik, who stood before her. (p. 326)

"Don't you think that a great yearning is like the birds' heading south -- a sign that somewhere life is in bloom?" -- Georg ("A Death"), p. 173

"There was no way in which I could have intended that [to get married]!" she interrupted him. "Tell me, would one of you [men] want that perhaps, a young man for instance, who had spent his entire youth in order to become free and self-reliant, and who was just on the threshold -- about to reach his goal -- who had learned to love life because of it, because of his professional opportunities, his responsibilities, his independence? No, I cannot envision this as my aim in life: home, family, housewife, children -- it is alien to me, alien. Perhaps only at this moment, at this time in my life, how do I know? Or maybe I would never be good at all that. Love and marriage are simply not the same thing. -- (Fenitschka) p. 39

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