Egon Schiele Quotations

To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?

At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants...

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

All beautiful and noble qualities have been united in me... I shall be the fruit which will leave eternal vitality behind even after its decay. How great must be your joy, therefore, to have given birth to me.

I am so rich that I must give myself away.

I believe in the immortality of all creatures.

I don't know whether there is anyone else at all who remembers my noble father with such sadness

My mother is a very strange woman... She doesn't understand me in the least and doesn't love me much either. If she had either love or understanding she would be prepared to make sacrifices

I must live in my own excrement, breathe in my own poisonous sticky fumes. Yet I am a human being! I still am. Does no one think of that?

Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.

I shall go so far that people will be seized with terror at the sight of each of my works of 'living' art.

Everything is dead while it lives.

No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.

I was in love with everything- I wanted to look with love at the angry people so that their eyes would be forced to respond; and I wanted to bring gifts to the envious and tell them that I am worthless.

I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds.

The picture must radiate light, the bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from outside.