Salome Hats
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: "The grave is not the end. From the graves of those we love most and where, with those we love most, are buried all our selfish drives and desires, we must draw the strength to dedicate ourselves wholly and unreservedly to the great purpose of our life: Behold: this is my religion."
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: Our first experience is, remarkably, of loss. A moment ago we still were everything, undivided; all other existence was indivisible from us. Then we were thrust into being born. We became a residual part of everything, a part which had to strive from then on not to fall into further diminution, which had to assert itself against a contrary world rising ever wider against it, a world into which it had fallen from completeness into an initially depriving emptiness.
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: 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.
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: I can neither live according to models, nor shall I ever be able to provide a model for anyone else. On the contrary, what I shall quite certainly do is to shape my own life according to myself, whatever may come of it. In this I have no principle to put forth, but something much more wonderful — something that is within oneself and is hot with sheer life, and rejoices and wants to come out.
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: As truly as I'd love a friend, I always have loved you, riddling life, whether I've laughed with you or wept, whether you have brought me pleasure or strife. Even in your sorrow I love you, and, when you scatter me through space, I will tear myself out of your arms as a friend from a dear friend's embrace. With all my strength I cling to you! Let all your fire enkindle me. Even in the heat of battle, let me unravel your mysteries. Thousands of years to live and think! In your arms I long to remain. And, when you have no more joy to give -- very well -- you still have your pain.
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: 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.
Description: Lou Andreas-Salomé quote: 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...
