Creativity Quote by Egon Schiele

Coming from Egon Schiele, “I believe in the immortality of all creatures” lands less like a comforting creed than a provocation hurled at a world obsessed with propriety, decay, and control. Schiele’s art is full of bodies that look too alive to be idealized and too vulnerable to be safe: twisted limbs, bruised color, eroticism that refuses to behave. “Immortality” here isn’t the soft-focus afterlife of church windows; it’s the stubborn persistence of animal life, desire, and suffering even when society tries to quarantine them behind manners.

The line also reads as a defensive metaphysics from someone who lived fast inside an era that made death feel routine. Schiele worked in a Vienna where Freud was naming the libido and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was cracking; he died at 28 during the 1918 influenza pandemic, just days after his pregnant wife. In that light, “all creatures” is the tell. He’s not privileging human souls. He’s leveling the hierarchy, insisting that the raw fact of being - human, insect, stray dog, lover - carries a charge that can’t be erased by moral judgment or physical extinction.

As intent, it’s a manifesto for the artist’s job: to trap life’s intensity in a form that outlasts the body. As subtext, it’s grief in advance - a way to stare down mortality by granting every living thing the dignity of permanence, if only in perception and art.