Famous quote by Egon Schiele

"Everything is dead while it lives"

About this Quote

Egon Schiele’s statement, “Everything is dead while it lives,” evokes a powerful paradox at the heart of existential and artistic thought. On first encounter, it strikes as nihilistic, yet within its brevity lies a layered meditation on the transient nature of existence and the mechanisms by which we come to understand life.

At its core, Schiele’s assertion reflects the inevitability of mortality that permeates every living moment. Life, in this view, is always moving inexorably toward its conclusion; the process of living is, paradoxically, a gradual continuous dying. The presence of death is woven into every pulse of life. Each heartbeat, breath, or fleeting sensation carries the awareness of its own finitude. By suggesting everything “is dead while it lives,” Schiele draws attention to this inseparability of life and death: living things are not merely heading toward death, but in a sense embody death already, simply by virtue of being bound to time and change.

From the perspective of art and perception, the phrase can also be engaged with as a commentary on representation and the freezes of life. For Schiele, whose art often explored the fragility and vulnerability of the human form, the act of capturing a living being on canvas is to commemorate something transitory. The moment a living subject is stilled, observed, analyzed, or depicted, it is transformed, its living presence negated as it becomes an object of memory or contemplation. There is a tension between the animate and inanimate, between being and having been.

Beyond a bleak worldview, Schiele’s words can be read as a call to embrace the bittersweet complexity of existence. The knowledge of mortality infuses our experiences with intensity, urgency, and poignancy. To live is to exist in the shadow of death, to appreciate that fragility is what makes presence so precious. Within that paradox, life’s meaning emerges.

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About the Author

Austria Flag This quote is written / told by Egon Schiele between June 12, 1890 and October 31, 1918. He/she was a famous Artist from Austria. The author also have 9 other quotes.
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