Top 15 Lou Andreas-Salomé Quotes

It delights me to note from year to year how long it takes for much that happens to one to become inner experience. It is only in old age that this process is completed, and for this reason it is right and proper to grow truly old, despite the less pleasant reverse side in the shape of infirmity. It seems to be that this is true even in matters of the intellect, not only in the emotional life. (p. 201)

I cannot think of any personal fate which could have cost me anything like such anguish. And I don't really believe that after this we shall ever be able to be really happy again. (p. 20)

It delights me that the one thinker I approached in my childhood [Spinoza] and almost adored now meets me again, and as the philosopher of psychoanalysis. Think far enough, correctly enough on any point at all, and you hit upon him; you meet him waiting for you, standing ready at the side of the road. (pp. 75-76)

[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)

Whatever happens to me -- I never lose the certainty that behind me arms are open to receive me.

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.

If for years I was your wife, it was because in you I encountered what is real for the first time: body and person indistinguishably one, an undeniable fact of life itself. Word for word, I could have confessed what you had said in your declaration of love: ‘You alone are real.’ With that, we became spouses, even before we were friends, and we became friends hardly by choice, but rather from an unseen but already consummated marriage. Not two halves searching for one another: a startled wholeness that recognized, with a shudder, its own incomprehensible unity. And so, we were siblings – but as in previous times, before incest became a sacrilege.

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.

Human life -- ah! life in general -- is poetry. Unconscious of ourselves, we live it -- day but day and piece by piece -- but in its inviolable wholeness it lives, it composes, us. Far from the old phrase: "turn your life into a work of art"; we are not our art work.

The most daring thing we have invented was to become human, and, with that, the creation of human values as life's most sublime adventure.

The more fully we enter into the 'challenge of the hour', into the present factual moment, into the conditions that hold from one case to another, instead of being trammeled by prescriptions and directives (written by human beings!), the more connectedly do we act in accord with the whole . . . If anyone thinks that is immorally presumptuous and high-handed, then it would be truer to call the childish-slavish obedience to prescriptions, which make everything easy, a convenient moral slovenliness!

[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

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

[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