Wealth & Money Quote by Egon Schiele

A line like this lands as both confession and dare: Schiele frames “rich” not as money but as surplus selfhood, an inner inventory so overflowing it becomes a problem to manage. The verb “must” is the tell. It’s not charity; it’s compulsion. If you’re that full of sensation, obsession, erotic charge, and dread, keeping it contained starts to feel like rot. So you “give yourself away” the way his drawings do: not genteel self-expression, but exposure, almost evisceration.

The subtext is also transactional. Schiele’s era made the artist into a modern brand before the term existed, and he understood that attention is earned through risk. To give yourself away is to turn intimacy into currency, to trade privacy for impact. The phrasing dodges martyrdom by sounding almost smug, but the smugness is defensive; it dares the viewer to call it narcissism while insisting it’s necessity. That tension mirrors the work: bodies contorted into honesty, desire made angular, beauty pushed into discomfort.

Context sharpens the sting. Vienna at the fin de siecle was sophisticated, anxious, morally policed, and hungry for rupture. Schiele’s career moved through scandal, censorship, and a culture that wanted transgression packaged as taste. In that pressure cooker, “rich” reads like a volatile resource: talent plus appetite plus fragility. Giving himself away becomes a survival strategy and an artistic ethic: if the world is going to judge you, you might as well hand it the evidence on your own terms.