Skip to content

Human life -- ah! life in general -- is poetry. Unconscious of ourselves, we live it -- day by 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.

— Lou Andreas-Salomé

Another quote →

More quotes by Lou Andreas-Salomé

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

Our first experience is, remarkably, of loss.

Let us see whether the vast majority of the so-called "insurmountable barriers" that the world draws are not harmless chalk lines!

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.

It delights me to note from year to year how long it takes for much that happens to one to become inner experience.

Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters (Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer) (1980)

All Lou Andreas-Salomé quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lou Andreas-Salomé (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.