Society’s logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist’s path.
~ Mark Rothko

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Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols.
~ Mark Rothko

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Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea.
~ Mark Rothko

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One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist.
~ Mark Rothko

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The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution.
~ Mark Rothko

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The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.
~ Mark Rothko

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It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way—not his way.
~ Mark Rothko

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If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.
~ Mark Rothko

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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
~ Mark Rothko

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