quotations about color
Color is a sort of mid-point between pure light and pure darkness.
NATHAN CABOT HALE
Abstraction in Art and Nature
White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
Strong, hard colors are like a shout: arresting, exciting, occasionally overpowering or jarring. Lacquer red, shocking pink, chrome yellow, orange, acid green, sharp turquoise, magenta, purple can be wonderful. But they can drown out a person.
ENID A. HAUPT
The Seventeen Book of Fashion and Beauty
Color is the overpowering of black.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Creator
It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
"I Have a Dream"
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.
GEORGIA O'KEEFE
Georgia O'Keefe: Nature and Abstraction
Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Goethe's Approach to Colour
The colors of my life
Are bountiful and bold,
The purple glow of indigo,
The gleam of green and gold.
The splendor of the sunrise,
The dazzle of a flame,
The glory of a rainbow,
I'd put 'em all to shame.
CY COLEMAN
Barnum
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
PABLO PICASSO
Arts tie Fiance
Colors. Would it be green or blue today? Maybe white--my favorite. A dark voice in the back of my mind offered no color at all as an alternative. I smothered that voice. The days of no color were simply too hard to bear.
JULIE HOCKLEY
Crow's Row
I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
"Painting as a Pastime,", Strand Magazine, Dec. 1921/Jan. 1922
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Stray Birds
In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.
VASSILY KANDINKSY
Über das Geistige in der Kunst
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
CLAUDE MONET
attributed, Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas
Life is about using the whole box of crayons.
RUPAUL
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teacher Tales
A world without color would definitely be a dull place. Black-and-white photography is a fun exercise in aesthetics, but imagine if one day we all woke up to find flowers that were only shades of gray! Or fall color that was as hue-less as rainy-day clouds.
ROB SHEPPARD
The Magic of Digital Nature Photography
Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.
ALEXANDER ELIOT
Sight and Insight
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away ... the color of where you can never go.
REBECCA SOLNIT
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
I'll close my eyes and just see pretty colors,
They're dancing just for me, pretty colors (pretty colors)
Locked in my mind they'll always be,
You'll never give your love to me,
So I'll just close my eyes and just see pretty colors (pretty colors)
FRANK SINATRA
"Pretty Colors"