Top 35 Mark Rothko Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Silence is so accurate.”

— Mark Rothko

2. “I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.”

— Mark Rothko

3. “A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.”

— Mark Rothko

4. “The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees.”

— Mark Rothko

5. “To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.”

— Mark Rothko

6. “There is more power in telling little than in telling all.”

— Mark Rothko

7. “There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.”

— Mark Rothko

8. “I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

— Mark Rothko

9. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.”

— Mark Rothko

10. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

— Mark Rothko

11. “Look, it’s my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it’s your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.”

— Mark Rothko

12. “You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I’m the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.”

— Mark Rothko

13. “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.”

— Mark Rothko

14. “This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.”

— Mark Rothko

15. “The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.”

— Mark Rothko

16. “It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.”

— Mark Rothko

17. “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”

— Mark Rothko

18. “If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”

— Mark Rothko

19. “The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.”

— Mark Rothko

20. “Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.”

— Mark Rothko

21. “Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.”

— Mark Rothko

22. “I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity.”

— Mark Rothko

23. “The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.”

— Mark Rothko

24. “My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes.”

— Mark Rothko

25. “We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move.”

— Mark Rothko

26. “The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.”

— Mark Rothko

27. “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.”

— Mark Rothko

28. “Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.”

— Mark Rothko

29. “I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.”

— Mark Rothko

30. “If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.”

— Mark Rothko

31. “With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.”

— Mark Rothko

32. “You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.”

— Mark Rothko

33. “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.”

— Mark Rothko

34. “Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

— Mark Rothko

35. “While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.”

— Mark Rothko

36. “We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”

— Mark Rothko

37. “Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.”

— Mark Rothko

38. “I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.”

— Mark Rothko

39. “And last, it may be worthwhile trying to hang something beyond the partial wall because some of the pictures do very well in a confined space.”

— Mark Rothko